Interview
Redouane Lachgar
Industrial Strategy Consultant | Textile Value Chains, Supply Chain Transformation & Circular Economy
Morocco’s Competitive Edge and the Rise of Nearshoring 2.0
Q1. Morocco is increasingly discussed as a potential textile and apparel hub close to Europe. What are the country’s strongest competitive advantages today?
Morocco’s core advantages are well known: geographic proximity to the EU, with very short lead times to major European markets; a preferential trade framework, including the EU-Morocco Free Trade Agreement and the ATPA inward-processing regime (Admission Temporaire pour Perfectionnement Actif); a workforce with decades of garment know-how; and genuine flexibility for small-to-medium series and fast replenishment.
But I would frame this precisely, because proximity alone is no longer a sufficient differentiator.
What increasingly decides an order is what I call Nearshoring 2.0: proximity coupled with regulatory and data readiness including preparing for ESPR requirements, the Digital Product Passport, supply-chain due diligence and increasingly demanding traceability requirements.
A factory two days from Zaragoza that cannot provide the required product-level data will eventually lose part of the advantage that geography gives it.
Morocco’s real competitive edge, therefore, is the combination of proximity, reactivity, flexibility and the ability to become compliance- and data-ready faster than more distant competitors.
Europe’s Nearshoring Shift and Morocco’s Five-Year Opportunity
Q2. Europe is looking more seriously at nearshoring and shorter supply chains. How big an opportunity could this create for Morocco’s textile industry over the next five years?
The opportunity is real, but conditional.
European brands are increasingly looking beyond pure lowest-cost sourcing toward shorter, more resilient and more traceable supply chains. Morocco is naturally positioned for reactive production, replenishment and small-to-medium series, particularly for European markets.
Over the next five years, this could translate into higher-value orders, deeper integration with European buyers and a stronger role for Morocco within regional supply chains.
But there are two important cautions.
First, proximity is being partly neutralised by air freight. Brands can increasingly substitute money for geography, flying products from Asia to Europe within a few days when speed is critical. I would even argue that air-freight export volumes should be monitored as an indicator of how much geographical proximity is actually translating into a competitive advantage.
Second, the opportunity will only materialise for operators that combine proximity with compliance, traceability and data capabilities.
Nearshoring is not a gift of geography. It is a window of opportunity that rewards those who upgrade — and gradually closes for those who wait.
Read More: Can Morocco Become a New Textile Powerhouse? Industry Experts Join the Debate
Where Morocco’s Textile Value Chain Needs Investment
Q3. What are the biggest gaps in Morocco’s textile value chain today? Where does the country need the most investment spinning, weaving, finishing, recycling, technology or logistics?
The structural weakness is upstream, particularly spinning, weaving and finishing, what we call amont in Morocco.
Morocco’s apparel exports remain highly concentrated toward the European Union, with Spain representing a particularly large share. At the same time, a significant part of the sector still operates through cut-make or CMT (façon) arrangements, often under the direction of foreign sourcing platforms that provide fabrics, accessories and technical specifications while Moroccan manufacturers provide production capacity.
This creates a double squeeze: compressed façon margins from above, and limited control over inputs from below.
The challenge lies in the type of upstream. Standardised, commodity yarns and fabrics are very hard to make profitable domestically. At that end of the market, local producers compete directly with Asian commodity costs while struggling to amortise shorter production runs.
The viable path is upstream oriented toward technical and higher value-added products, where specification and performance, rather than cost, determine competitiveness.
So the question is not whether Morocco needs more upstream capacity, but what type of upstream capacity can create a sustainable competitive advantage.
The priority should therefore be selective upstream integration: technical and higher value-added fabric production rather than standardised commodity output, stronger finishing capacity, and the enabling layers traceability, data and industrial sorting infrastructure.
Logistics, by comparison, is already a relative strength of the Moroccan model.
Building an Industrial Textile Recycling Ecosystem
Q4. You mentioned that the real challenge in textile recycling is not necessarily technology, but building the ecosystem around collection, sorting and traceability. What needs to happen for Morocco to develop this ecosystem at industrial scale?
Exactly. The main bottleneck is not technology; it is the ecosystem around it. And within that ecosystem, the most fragile link is collection.
In Morocco, textile-waste collection is still largely carried out by informal individual collectors who often have no legal status or formal workspace. Building a sustainable industrial system on an informal and unrecognised base is extremely difficult.
The sequence therefore matters.
First, the collection chain needs to be legally recognised and structured. This is where representative organisations of collectors and recyclers, together with the relevant ministries and public institutions, can play a decisive role.
Second, Morocco needs industrial-scale sorting capacity. Quality-graded sorting is the real keystone because it is what turns heterogeneous textile waste into a reliable industrial feedstock.
Third, traceability needs to be built on top of this system, so that materials can be properly classified, certified and reintroduced into production.
There is also an important question of flows and ownership. For example, post-industrial offcuts processed under the ATPA regime can raise questions regarding ownership and the right to valorise the material, particularly when the imported material belongs to the European buyer. Policy therefore needs to reflect the realities of the existing value chain rather than being designed independently of them.
Could Morocco Recycle European Textile Waste at Scale?
Q5. Could Morocco become a recycling hub for European textile waste and used garments, rather than seeing large volumes continue to move to other African markets? What would be required to make this commercially and environmentally sustainable?
It is possible, but I would resist treating it as a foregone conclusion.
Two distinctions are important.
First, there is an important regulatory and operational distinction between post-consumer textile waste and post-industrial textile waste generated within Moroccan factories. EU rules governing waste shipments are particularly relevant to cross-border movements of waste, but these flows should not be conflated with industrial textile waste generated locally.
Second, and more importantly, there is the economic question.
Circularity does not yet have viable business economics without two essential conditions: competitive recycled feedstock and genuine downstream demand for recycled materials.
Importing European textile waste only makes sense if Morocco can sort it to the required quality, valorise it locally and sell the resulting recycled material into markets that are willing to pay for recycled content.
Without that demand signal, volumes will continue to move toward lower-cost destinations.
So the requirement is not simply recycling capacity. Morocco needs high-quality sorting, local industrial outlets for recycled fibres and materials, and the certification and traceability systems that allow recycled content to generate commercial value.
Environmental sustainability ultimately needs to be supported by commercial sustainability. If the economics do not work, the circular model will not scale.
Read More: 45 Textile & Apparel Companies Listed Under Morocco in the OEKO-TEX® Buying Guide
How Morocco Can Compete with Türkiye, Egypt and Asia
Q6. Can Morocco realistically compete with countries such as Türkiye, Egypt and Asian manufacturing hubs, or should it build a different competitive model based on speed, proximity, sustainability and higher-value production?
Morocco should not try to compete head-to-head on cost. That contest is lost in advance.
Türkiye, for example, is not only a competitor but is also actively investing in Morocco. That tells us something important: the competitive landscape is becoming increasingly integrated, rather than simply being a contest between countries.
The right answer for Morocco is a differentiated model based on proximity, speed, flexibility, compliance and higher-value production rather than volume at the lowest possible price.
Concretely, that means moving up the value chain: technical textiles, better finishing, faster replenishment, greater flexibility and increasingly the ability to arrive data-ready for European regulations.
Egypt has its own advantages, including cost competitiveness and preferential market access, while Asian hubs have enormous scale and are increasingly using air freight to reduce the speed gap. Morocco’s defensible position is therefore to become the reactive, compliant and higher-value nearshore partner for Europe not a cheaper version of Asia.
Three Textile Investment Opportunities in Morocco
Q7. If you were advising an international textile company considering investment in Morocco today, which three areas would you identify as the most promising opportunities?
I would point to three areas.
First, higher-value and technical production. This is where Morocco’s future value lies, and it is broad enough to include a specific, often overlooked upstream opportunity. I would not dismiss investment in spinning and weaving outright but it has to be the right upstream.
The opportunity lies in technical yarns and technical fabrics destined for high value-added end uses: personal protective equipment and protective technical garments, technical and performance sportswear, and other high-specification products where fabric performance, certification and reliability, not labour cost, determine the sale.
In these segments, integrated upstream capacity becomes a genuine competitive asset: it shortens development cycles, secures the technical know-how embedded in the fabric, and captures value that today largely sits abroad.
What Morocco should avoid is upstream investment aimed at basic, standardised fabrics for simple garments, there it would compete head-on with Asian commodity costs, on volumes it cannot amortise. Finishing capacity remains part of this same priority, as it is often the real technical and regulatory chokepoint.
Second, the circularity-enabling layer: industrial sorting, preparation and traceability infrastructure. In my view, this is one of the key missing links for building a genuine textile circularity ecosystem in Morocco.
Third, compliance and data-readiness as a service, the capability to generate and manage product-level information required by frameworks such as ESPR, the Digital Product Passport and supply-chain due diligence. This third opportunity is perhaps the least capital-intensive and potentially the fastest to deploy, and it protects and increases the value of the industrial capacity the sector already possesses.
The common thread across all three is the same: Morocco should invest where proximity, quality and specification create value and avoid re-entering competition based on volume and cost alone.
Read More: Can Morocco Become a New Textile Powerhouse? Industry Experts Join the Debate
Morocco’s Textile Industry Vision for 2030
Q8. Looking toward 2030, what is your vision for Morocco’s textile industry? Could it become one of the leading textile, apparel and circular-economy hubs in the Euro-Mediterranean region?
I’m optimistic, but not triumphalist.
Morocco can become one of the reference textile and circular-economy hubs of the Euro-Mediterranean region by 2030 but through a Nearshoring 2.0 model rather than by simply replaying the traditional low-cost manufacturing story.
That means a sector that has reduced its concentration risk in a single market, selectively rebuilt the parts of its upstream value chain that can genuinely be profitable, formalised and industrialised its collection and sorting base, and decisively become data- and compliance-ready ahead of its competitors.
The technology and the geographical proximity are already available to us. The real determinants will be institutional and industrial: formalising the collection chain, aligning early with European regulations, developing the right upstream capabilities, and treating resource efficiency as a driver of industrial performance rather than simply as a sustainability narrative.
If we do that, a strong Moroccan position by 2030 is credible.
If we treat nearshoring as a windfall rather than a window of opportunity, it will not be.
