The Cecotec group and the Almussafes City Council (Valencia) have signed a protocol of actions to promote the establishment in the municipality of a gigafactory aimed at the industrialized construction of large-scale housing.
This strategic project, whose arrival was already announced last July and which is conditioned to the mandatory administrative and urban processing, aims to become "one of the reference facilities in modular construction in Europe, with a planned investment of 150 million euros by the Valencian-origin holding and the creation of around 4,000 direct and indirect jobs," the company emphasizes in a statement.
The factory will be located in the new ZND-IN1 sector, included in the revision of the General Urban Planning Plan (PGOU) of Almussafes, currently in the final phase of definitive approval. This area will reserve more than 515,000 m2 for the project, designed to accommodate large industrial infrastructures with a high technological level.
The plan is born with the goal of promoting "a leap in scale in the residential sector, transferring to construction the processes typical of advanced industry through automation, robotization, and digitalization," the promoters explain.
When the plant operates at full capacity, technical calculations point to a production capacity of up to 6,000 homes per year, which represents around 500,000 m2 of constructed surface annually. To achieve this, it will operate with the industrialization standard of grade 6, the highest in the sector, in which approximately 95% of the building is designed, equipped, and checked in the factory before its assembly on the site.
This production system, they detail, makes it possible to reduce delivery times to an average of three months and avoid the risks of cost overruns derived from inflation on site. Thus, the gigafactory will serve developers, public administrations, investors, and professionals in the sector, both inside and outside Spain, ensuring total certainty in budgets and fixed execution deadlines.
For Cecotec, this new infrastructure will allow "to apply its proven model of productive efficiency and scalability to a market strained by the lack of responsiveness."
The CEO and founder of Cecotec, César Orts, states: "Access to housing is the great socioeconomic challenge of our generation. Conventional construction lacks the necessary productive capacity to meet demand and contain prices, and industrialization is the key to building with technical rigor, quality, speed, and competitive costs."
"At Cecotec -he continues- we know how to optimize massive industrial processes and we want to put that experience at the service of a real, sustainable, and reference solution from the Comunitat Valenciana."
The mayor of Almussafes, Toni González, has highlighted the importance of the agreement and the industrial appeal of the municipality. "We are facing a historic opportunity for Almussafes. For decades we have built a deeply industrial municipality and now we have to be able to take the next step: maintain our strength, but also diversify it and attract new sectors capable of generating employment, investment, and future," the mayor pointed out, emphasizing that the scale of the initiative "can mark a before and after for the municipality."
Connectivity, employment, and training
Cecotec emphasizes that it has chosen Almussafes for its "strategic connectivity by road and rail" —with direct links to the Port of Valencia and the Mediterranean Corridor— as well as for its solid industrial tradition, which ensures a qualified workforce and a consolidated business ecosystem.
With a local unemployment rate around 7%, the launch of the factory "opens a scenario of enormous significance for the municipality, with the horizon of moving towards full employment," the company points out.
To channel these opportunities, the protocol includes collaboration with the Local Development Agency (ADL) of the Almussafes City Council, which will undertake labor intermediation tasks and support in the dissemination of personnel selection processes.
Through this instrument, specific training actions will be promoted to adjust professional training to the technical profiles demanded by the project, guaranteeing at all times equality of opportunities and the absence of discrimination in access to employment.
In the same way, the Cecotec group expresses its commitment to "promote, as long as professional profiles and technical needs allow, the dissemination of its job offers in the locality and its area of influence, as well as the participation of suppliers and auxiliary industry in the area."
The signed protocol establishes a first roadmap to coordinate technical and urban planning work between the parties. In this context, the development of the initiative is conditioned to the processing and approval of the relevant administrative procedures in accordance with current regulations.
The construction of the facilities and the start of the activity will be gradually deployed in the coming years, as the various mandatory administrative and sectoral phases are favorably overcome.