388 industrial establishments closed between 2011 and 2015

The Lebanese Industrialists Association (LIA) published on Tuesday its first industrial index after two years of preparation in collaboration with the finance ministry and the contribution of the Banque Libano-Francaise and Indevco Group. The LIA president Fadi Gemayel revealed a decline in the size of activity in the industrial sector by USD 1.8 billion during the period 2012 and 2015 and a fall from USD 10.5 billion in 2012 to USD 8.8 billion in 2015. Some 388 out of 2365 establishments with a total of 78 thousand employees have closed down, Gemayel said. In this respect, according to a study prepared by the LIA, the number of industrial companies in 2015 stood at 1977 companies, posting a 4.4% decline during the period from 2011 to 2015, compared to 2365 enterprises in 2011, that is by a loss of 388 enterprises. These institutions are distributed across 13 sectors, as follows: the food industries boasting the lion’s share (373 factories), noting that these factories embrace the largest workforce (around 33%); followed by chemical and plastic industries (some 272 factories), and paper and cardboard industries (224 factories). Accordingly, affected by this downward spiral, were the food, plastic and metal manufacturing plants at a rate of 56%, whereby, the production of plastic factories fell by (4.6%), followed by food processing plants (5.3%) and the metal factories by (6.8%). Maintaining that this database can be used initially by the Lebanese government to formulate a realistic industrial policy, Gemayel called for stepped up decisions to promote the sector based on two basic elements, protection and stimulation, combined with a rescue plan involving industrial exports. (Al Akhbar, Al Diyar, March 22, 2017)