Coca-Cola EP will close the Malaga bottling plant at the end of the year

Coca-Cola closes its Malaga plant to concentrate its production in Seville.
The management of Coca-Cola European Partners announced this Thursday to the representatives of the workers the closure of the bottling plant located in Malaga, which will take effect at the end of this year. Around 80 people work there and it belongs to the Rendelsur subsidiary.
According to company sources, the activity carried out by this facility, with two bottling lines, will move to Seville, which has 11 lines and has the capacity to produce 25% of the volume that Coca-Cola European Partners sells annually. in Spain, being the group’s largest plant in all of Europe. The same sources indicate that negotiations with worker representatives will begin next week with all options on the table, including the option to relocate employees affected by the measure. The intention shown from CCEP is to reach an agreement “as soon as possible.” “CCEP’s commitment is to seek all possible options to maintain employment in Andalusia and to ensure that we maintain our industrial capacity in this autonomous community,” they say from the company.
The bottler detaches the decision from any impact suffered by Covid-19 in recent months and explains it within a strategy to improve efficiency and economies of scale within the company, and explains that until now Andalusia was the only one European region that had two bottling facilities. According to data provided by CCEP, in 2019 production at the Sevillian plant reached 130 million boxes compared to 20 million in Malaga.
With the closure of this plant, CCEP will have seven production facilities in Spain, located in Coruña, Bilbao, Barcelona, Valencia, Tenerife, Seville and Valencia. In addition, it has one in Portugal.
Although the bottler detaches the decision from the impacts of the pandemic, the truth is that it has caused a significant decrease in the company’s income. In the first half of the year, it reduced its net profit by 75% to 126 million, with a 16.5% drop in revenue. In the Iberian market, of which Spain accounts for the vast majority of turnover, this had fallen by 28.5%, and only in the second quarter did the decline reach 48%, punished by the closure of the hotel industry and its slow recovery once reopened.