Next week the Executive Council of the Government of Aragon will approve a decree creating the company to be known as Aragón Plataforma Logística (APL), a company fully owned by the regional government of Aragon and dependent on the Corporación Empresarial Pública de Aragón, the parent company for the group of businesses headed by the Minister for Economy, Industry and Employment in the Aragonese government, Marta Gastón. The company will centralise and unify the business management – economic, administrative, commercial, technical, financial, etc. – of the companies linked to industrial and service logistics in order to optimise their resources and streamline their management. This will allow APL to combine the holdings of the companies in which the corporation has a majority stake in the autonomous region of Aragon. These comprise the Plaza (Zaragoza), Plhus (Huesca) and Platea Gestión (Teruel) logistics platforms and the Plaza Desarrollos Logísticos (PDL) and Sociedad para el Desarrollo de Calamocha companies, in addition to the stake held in Expo Zaragoza Empresarial. Nonetheless, APL is contemplating the possibility of incorporating new assets in the future.
The creation of APL, whose brand was presented on 5 April in the Crown Hall of the Pignatelli Building, home to the Aragonese executive, by regional premier Javier Lambán, is part of the government’s strategy of streamlining the management of government-owned companies in the industrial sector, and falls within the commitments taken on both in the 2016–2020 Government Plan and in the Corporación Empresarial Pública de Aragón’s strategic plan for the same period. This document aims to further and deepen the model of governance and discipline – not only financial – of the group of government-owned companies.
APL will become a subgroup of the Corporación Empresarial Pública de Aragón devoted to logistics, industrial and tertiary activities. In the initial stages, this will allow joint commercial management to be implemented, which will centralise decision-making and simplify governing bodies. Likewise, the decree to be approved by the executive council will open up the government’s logistics-based strategy to participation from other players in the sector, in order to turn it into a comprehensive strategy affecting the entire autonomous region.
For this purpose, as a complementary measure to the decree giving rise to APL, the company’s articles of association also contemplate the future creation of an ‘Advisory Board for the Development of Industrial Logistics in the Autonomous Community of Aragon’, which will be a participatory and advisory entity to be created at the request of, and depending on, the future board of directors of APL, and it will have its own set of regulations. This entity will have as its founding members, as announced on 5 April, government-owned and private sector companies linked to the development of logistics, such as the Aragonese Logistics Cluster (Alía), the Zaragoza Logistics Center (ZLC), Adif, Aena, Aragón Exterior (Arex), ITAInnova, the IAF Pilot Programme, Mercazaragoza, Zaragoza Maritime Terminal (TMZ), the Teruel Airport Platform (Plata) and the Monzón Intermodal Terminal.
Furthermore, there are also plans for the creation of ‘Permanent Coordination Committees’ that are open to participation from city and municipal councils and local authorities with major logistics activities in order to strengthen the collaboration between institutions to attract and encourage the creation of new companies.
The presentation event for the APL brand also involved the signing of a Commitment Charter as the basis of this joint strategy for the comprehensive development of logistics in Aragon. The charter opened by setting out the values that have turned Aragon into a logistics powerhouse for southern Europe. It also announced the demands set out by the Government of Aragon, particularly in terms of infrastructure, before the Spanish national authorities and those of the European Union (the complete text may be consulted on the APL website).
www.aragonplataformalogística.es
