\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t The recent shutdown of Fate, an 86-year-old tire manufacturer that employed more than 900 people, is far from being an isolated case in Argentina. Official figures show that factories in the country are working at half of their capacity and that, since Javier Milei took office in December 2023, over 20,000 companies have closed.<\/p>\n
Fate\u2019s closure is part of a wave that is not only affecting small and medium enterprises, but major companies as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of companies are shutting down, especially in the Buenos Aires area,\u201d said Florencia Fiorentin, chief economist at the Epyca consulting firm. \u201cBasically, a drop in demand is combined with import liberalization \u2014 thus, companies are not selling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alejandro Assuma, the Fate representative at SUTNA, the tire workers\u2019 union, said that the conflict started in 2024, when the company laid off 100 people.<\/p>\n
Media reported that the national administration blamed SUTNA for Fate\u2019s shutdown, but Assuna rejected the idea.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt this moment, Fate has high production, a huge economic holding company with enormous backing with the aluminum company Aluar and energy companies \u2014 they are moving their investments to the energy sector,\u201d said Assuma.<\/p>\n
The latest report by the statistics bureau, the INDEC, showed that energy is one of the few sectors that grew from December 2024 to December 2025.<\/p>\n
The report also said that the industry was working at 53.8% of its capacity in December. The sectors that are seeing the worst part are the automotive, plastic, and textile industries, which are only operating at 31.2%, 33.4%, and 35.2% of their potential.<\/p>\n
According to Lorenzo Sigaut Gravina, macroeconomics head at the Equilibra consultancy, \u201cbig companies, which manufacture finalized products, are the ones directly competing with imports \u2014 that\u2019s why they are suffering the impact more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sigaut Gravina said that tradable sectors \u2014 those exposed to imports and exports \u2014 have dropped during President Javier Milei\u2019s presidency. He called the phenomenon a \u201csubstitution\u201d of locally made products for imported goods.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe economy used to be very, very closed, and it makes sense for it to open up, but\u2026 local production is falling and imports and import volumes are increasing. It was logical for imports to increase, but it was not so logical for local production to fall,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The economist added that in most sectors, including the tire industry, \u201cmost imports are coming from China,\u201d even though Milei is a close ally to Donald Trump, who is waging a trade war against the Asian country.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the government seems bent on opening up the economy to imports.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome are going to go bankrupt,\u201d said Miguel Boggiano, an economist and adviser to Milei, in an interview withTV station TN.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not pleasant to say this, but neither is it pleasant that 47 million Argentinians have to pay high prices because 500,000 of them have the sacred cow,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The recent shutdown of Fate, an 86-year-old tire manufacturer that employed more than 900 people, is far from being an isolated case in Argentina. Official figures show that factories in the country are working at half of their capacity and that, since Javier Milei took office in December 2023, over 20,000 companies have closed. Fate\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":36457,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,10037,684,5070,59],"tags":[96,10036,4243,5068,86],"class_list":["post-36456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economics","category-fate","category-industry","category-manufacturing-industry","category-politics","tag-economics","tag-fate","tag-industry","tag-manufacturing-industry","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}