Catalan industry: the Chinese to the rescue

A few days ago, the news announced that around 400 Catalan jobs will be saved due to an investment by a Chinese company in a bankrupt Catalan company put on sale by the liquidator. Jiaxipera, the compressor arm of Huanyi, a group controlled by the state-owned Sichuan Changhong company, will buy the Catalan compressor maker Cubigel at a price of 600.000 EUR and will be responsible for a credit of 2 M EUR received by the regional government's credit unit to take up production again. Jiaxipera has agreed to maintain 386 of the 551 jobs at Cubigel, with a 15% reduction in salaries though. The Chinese company will inject 3.5 M EUR immediately to revive Cubigel's cash-flow, and they plan to install a technical institute for compressors at the factory, that will do part of the group's I&D activities, and to convert their Catalan subsidiary into their logistics and commercial base for the European market.

[The information in this post comes from an original article published in La Vanguardia newspaper.]

El País asks "When will they move out?"

Massive youth unemployment, around 50% for those below 35, is one of the biggest problems of the Spanish economic crisis. A big part of these unemployed do not have any (tertiary) education, but there are also a lot of university grads struggling to find a job that would pay an independent living. Therefore, young (and not so young) people continue to live with their parents, do not get married, do not have children and thus in the long run will exacerbate the problems of an ageing society. El País has this article on the "lost generation".