Ford moves its domicile to the Valencian Country

ValenciaFord Spain has announced this Thursday that it will move its headquarters from the Madrid town of Alcobendas to the Valencian town of Almussafes. With this decision, the car company returns to the place where it was established in 1973, when it arrived in Spain and which, moreover, is where the only factory it has in the State is located.

The transfer, which will take place from April 1, 2024, will not involve “any movement of personnel or facilities, nor will it have a fiscal impact on the company, since the fiscal domicile has always been located in Almussafes” , as detailed by Ford in the ARA. Currently, the company’s headquarters are located in Alcobendas, the city where its sales area and other activities, such as the distribution of vehicles, are centralized.

Despite its lack of real economic impact, the transfer of headquarters has been used as a political weapon to question the confidence that different territories inspire in companies and investors. Catalonia, which suffered a stampede of companies caused by the PP government in 2017 after 1-O, has been constantly singled out in the media and politically for these movements, and, recently, it has seen what the Community of Madrid was like, the main beneficiary of the transfers at the time, who received: a month ago now, Ferrovial triggered an earthquake by announcing the change of its headquarters from Madrid to the Netherlands.

The announcement coincides with the period of negotiations that Ford maintains with unions to agree on the terms of the employment regulation file with which the company intends to reduce its workforce by 1,144 employees, 960 of them from the factory of Almussafes, where it has around 5,800 workers.

The decision has been very well received by the Generalitat Valenciana which, through its president, Ximo Puig, has defended that the measure represents “an important endorsement of the stability enjoyed by the Valencian Community and the confidence it arouses” between In this regard, Puig highlighted that, recently, Ford chose the Almussafes plant to lead the manufacture of its electric vehicles in Europe.

Ximo Puig sees a “trend”

The Valencian president has detailed that the Generalitat has “worked” with Ford over the last few months to bring about the transfer of the company’s headquarters and has defended that this is not an “isolated move but a trend” as demonstrated, he said, by the 3,100 companies from other communities that have moved their headquarters to the Valencian Country since 2017.

The transfer of the companies’ headquarters, in this case from the Community of Madrid to the Valencian Country, is not at all exceptional, nor does it always have, in the Spanish capital and its surroundings, the main focus of attraction. In fact, from 2017 to the end of 2022, 8,921 companies have left the Community of Madrid. However, and thanks to the arrival of 12,610 companies, in this period the Community of Madrid has had a positive balance of 3,689 companies.