Prime Minister Nicolae-Ionel Ciucă’s visit to the Industrial Platform Dacia Mioveni, Arges county and working(...)

Press statements by Prime Minister Nicolae-Ionel Ciucă after a visit to the Industrial Platform Dacia Mioveni, Arges county

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Nicolae-Ionel Ciucă:Good afternoon. Allow me to start by thanking the Dacia Pitesti Platform management team, the president of Renault Group, Mr Senard, and all those who work in this plant, a plant with tradition, with history, which started its activity 54 years ago, made history. Today we can state with optimism that it has a future because it is very clear from the projects that we discussed today that there are new projects at the Dacia plants, there is a perspective in everything that means the development of the activity for the next ten years and beyond this term.

I thank those people carrying out their activity here, they make us proud of what they are producing here, they carry the name of Romania in more than 40 countries where the vehicles produced at Mioveni are exported, for this, we are grateful to them. Secondly, I want to mention that I wanted to come to Pitesti, Dacia Plant, as it is a large energy consumer - I approved yesterday, in the Government, the scheme of 1.5 billion in support of large consumers, and I wanted to have the certitude that all these coordination elements are functional and can be applied in reality, we manage to put them together, to coordinate the efforts that the plant management are making so that we can adapt ourselves to this energy crisis period. The European money available to us can be used to make this transition to green energy, to achieve new energy-producing sources, and to make sure that these future projects we have talked about, and to which they committed, will have coherence and will be materialized as they have been assumed. At the same time, I want to mention the fact that the Romanian industry has currently a word to say both in Europe and the world. The Romanian industry has consistency and a future. 15,000 directly employed people are working on this platform, and there is a collaboration whereby jobs are secured for other 150,000 persons. It is important that this signal of trust reaches large industries, important manufacturers, and SMEs. SMEs are the backbone. We have a series of programs ongoing in support of SMEs, but we need to make sure that we pay due attention to large industrial producers. We managed to prove optimism regarding the capacity to adapt to all these requirements as assumed at the EU level, the environmental requirements. The plant aims at zero carbon emissions as of 2030, which is very important. I do not want to talk about new projects and models that are about to enter the production line. I got off earlier from a car that is going to enter the production line at the beginning of next year and it is a hybrid car, it is a car that, for sure, we want to find as soon as possible in the car shows. From my point of view, it is our responsibility, the Government's responsibility to have this line of dialogue permanently maintained and to find solutions together to guarantee that we know to use the resources and opportunities that our country has. We also have to take care that people can further benefit from safe jobs. Thank you once again. I congratulate you and I wish that for another 54 from now on, Dacia Pitesti plants can manufacture cars not only for the internal market but for export as well. Thank you very much.