EXCLUSIVE- Brilliance Auto to invest USD 120 mn to return to domestic assembly: Brilliance Bavarian Auto is planning to invest USD 120 mn to use the existing facilities of its parent company — BMW’s Bavarian Auto Group (BAG) — to begin assembling its China-origin cars by early 2020, Brilliance’s general manager and head of the Automotive Marketing Information Council (AMIC) Khaled Saad told Enterprise. The company will use BAG’s factory in 6 October temporarily while it works on acquiring a land plot in the Gulf of Suez for its own assembly facility. Brilliance will also launch its first electric car model this winter.

Brilliance’s planned return to domestic assembly is partially thanks to the Madbouly Cabinet’s proposed automotive incentives program for local assembly, which would see the finance and trade ministries provide custom breaks to local assemblers and manufacturers that use at least 45% local components. Saad tells us Brilliance sees this threshold as feasible, and intends to meet the requirement. We were told the local component requirement would be a sliding scale based on how much is actually used. This approach will effectively replace the now-scrapped automotive directive, which was sharply opposed by Egypt’s European trade partners — a key hurdle to the directive seeing the light of day.