Casablanca: Morocco and China have a long-standing, solid economic partnership based on trust, complementarity, and a shared ambition to strengthen trade and investment cooperation, said Chakib Alj, president of the General Confederation of Moroccan Enterprises (CGEM), on Thursday in Casablanca.

According to Agence Marocaine De Presse, Alj emphasized during a meeting with a delegation from the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT), that China is now one of the Kingdom’s most important economic partners. As part of the “Belt and Road” Initiative, which Morocco was the first North African country to join, this cooperation builds on the profound economic transformation undertaken by the Kingdom over the past two decades.

Thanks to world-class infrastructure, strategic logistics platforms, and integrated industrial ecosystems in high value-added sectors, Morocco is establishing itself as a reliable and competitive industrial and investment platform, offering Chinese companies privileged access to African, Mediterranean, and global markets, he explained.

For his part, CCPIT President Ren Hongbin said that his institution, as China’s largest trade and investment promotion agency, has been working for several decades to strengthen economic and trade relations between China and Morocco. “The CCPIT has been a pioneer in bilateral business relations, with the signing of the first Sino-Moroccan trade agreement in 1958, the year diplomatic relations were established between the two countries,” Hongbin pointed out.

Addressing the economic outlook, Hongbin noted that this year marks the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the strategic partnership between China and Morocco, pointing out that China has been the Kingdom’s third largest trading partner globally and its largest in Asia for many years. He specified that the volume of bilateral trade reached $10 billion in 2025, up 21.2% year-on-year.

The CCPIT President also noted the growing popularity of high-quality Moroccan products on the Chinese market, particularly agri-food products and cosmetics, alongside the rise in Chinese investment in Morocco in key industrial sectors such as new energies and automotive batteries, which has led to the creation of thousands of local jobs.

In this regard, both parties expressed their shared wish to further strengthen exchanges between the business communities of both countries and to capitalize on existing cooperation mechanisms in order to elevate the Morocco-China economic partnership, in the service of mutually beneficial and sustainable development.