In New Caledonia, the layoff of 1,200 employees at the Koniambo Nickel SAS (KNS) plant will take effect on August 31. This economic and social crisis reflects the difficulties of the nickel industry in recent years, a sector which nevertheless occupies an essential place in the economy of the archipelago.
Also called “the factory of the North”, KNS also embodied a political project intended to rebalance the Caledonian territory, organized between the pro-independence North and the loyalist South.
A sector victim of competition
In more than ten years of activity, the KNS site has never been profitable and has therefore accumulated 14 billion euros of debt. If this is explained by technical choices, the high cost of energy in New Caledonia must also be taken into account: “The cost of energy in New Caledonia is too high. And inevitably, with competition from low-cost countries like Indonesia, it becomes too complicated for the Caledonian industry and other countries like Australia, where central factories have also closed.“, explain Samuel Gorohouna.
The end of a regional dynamic
As New Caledonia is heavily dependent on nickel, the closure of the KNS site raises the question of the economic future of the archipelago. As stated Samuel Gorohouna“nickel [représentant] 93% of Caledonian exports, we can clearly see that the post-nickel era has not necessarily been fully prepared, even if we have been talking about it for many years“. Furthermore, beyond being a vital industry for the archipelago, nickel is also at the heart of the economy of the Voh region. According to Yann Bencivengo“With the appearance of the factory, the Voh region was transformed. (…) The factory was a political project, linked to the desire for economic independence of this northern province controlled by the independentists“.