Last week saw an official one-day visit to Germany by Algeria’s Prime Minister, Abdelmalek Sellal. He came on 12 January, at the invitation of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and accompanied by a ministerial delegation.
On the side-lines of his formal meetings with Merkel, Sellal also attended and co-chaired the opening session of an inaugural business forum that was intended, according to the official agenda, ‘to identify opportunities likely to promote partnerships between economic operators of both countries.’ The forum, strongly attended by some 200 German business representatives, was co-chaired on the German side by Uwe Beckmeyer, the Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.
Germany is an increasingly important business partner for Algeria, as well as being a sympathetic political ally. Recent top-level meetings between the two countries have included the visit to Algeria of the former German president Horst Köhler in November 2007, the visit of Chancellor Angela Merkel in July 2008, and the visit of President Bouteflika to Berlin in December 2010. The 2010 meeting was marked by the creation of an Algerian-German Joint Economic Commission, the first session of which was held in Berlin the following year.
Sellal’s address to the plenary session of forum included an assessment of Algeria’s economic situation, and the potential for development. It was followed by business-to-business meetings of companies from across the industrial and economic sectors. The result of these meetings was that about 30 contracts involving agriculture, mechanical construction, the environment, water treatment, the production of spare parts, public works, and logistics and telecommunication, will be signed in the coming months.
With the European market saturated, Germany sees Algeria as a platform for German industrial expansion, not just into Algeria but also the North African region as a whole.
German businesses are showing particular interest in Algeria’s south, not merely for solar and conventional energy developments, but also for new and large-scale agricultural projects, the agro-food business, and manufacturing developments such as textiles production. German companies have also proved willing to invest in major environmental projects, especially in Ouargla and El Oued.
We believe that there are some 200 German businesses currently involved in Algeria. According to feedback from Sellal’s visit, a number of these are planning to expand their operations in the country. At the same time, a number of businesses that have not yet set foot there have expressed a strong interest in visiting Algeria to assess its potential. We therefore expect a number of German businesses to make their exploratory first visits to the country in the next few months.
This article was taken from Menas Associates’ Algeria Politics & Security publication.
