Lajme flash
The Prime Minister's company that produces cars with a total salary budget of 12 thousand euros per month
2026-08-01 22:52:00 / POLITIKË
Klodian Tomorri
Prime Minister Edi Rama yesterday promoted with great fanfare the first 40 military vehicles, according to him, produced in Albania, from the partnership between the public company Kayo and the private company Timak.
But when citizens flooded social media with comments about how an Albanian company produces Toyota, Land Cruiser or Man vehicles, the prime minister was forced to make a clarification with notes of nervousness.
"The cars are of NATO standards and yes, they are manufactured in Albania! Yes, with spare parts taken from the giants of the automotive industry, but whoever says this is not called production does not know what they are talking about and meanwhile whoever thinks this is a game, let him ask himself how it is possible that 30 allied and friendly countries have signed purchase contracts from the Albanian company?! Hatred is the blackness of God, my wise grandmother used to say," wrote Edi Rama.
Global production chains are an undeniable reality of the modern economy, for many years now. But has Albania really entered the automotive manufacturing industry, as the Prime Minister claims?
There is a very simple way to answer this question. To see what is the added value that is generated in the country. And the added value comes from the three factors of production. Labor, capital, or the efficiency with which these two are combined, which is otherwise known as productivity.
Timak Defence, the company that supplied the 40 army vehicles, was established on August 4 last year. At the end of December, the company, which is 80 percent owned by Timak and 20 percent by Kayo, had a total of 14 employees. The table in the photo below shows the main expense items in Timak Defence's balance sheet for the past year.
Timak Defence salary expenses
According to the table, for 5 months the company had a gross salary fund of 5.8 million lek or about 61 thousand euros. So on average, Timak's salary fund is 12 thousand euros per month and its 14 employees receive a gross salary of about 860 euros, net much less than that.
So the total value added by labor in Albania from car production, as the Prime Minister says, is 12 thousand euros per month or about 150 thousand euros per year. This wage fund is classic for a small kiosk, coffee bar or micro-enterprise.
By comparison, the DMM Dräxlmaier Manufacturing factory in Kavadarci, North Macedonia, which produces spare parts for vehicles, pays 5.8 million euros in wages per month or about 70 million euros in wages per year.
The second factor of production that generates added value is capital. In the case of manufacturing industries, capital is mainly physical, i.e. in the form of machinery, equipment, production lines, and so on.
On the balance sheet, this capital is classified as long-term assets. According to Timak Defence's balance sheet, at the end of last year the company's long-term assets totaled 146 thousand lekë or 1 thousand 500 euros. These must be the welding machines.
Timak Defence Assets
Yes, the company turns out to have 10.5 million euros in short-term assets. These are prepayments that Timak Defence has received from the state budget through secret contracts, that is, from citizens' money to supply public institutions with drones and vehicles. ( Read here )
In short, Timak Defence generates negligible added value from labor and has zero physical capital. It practically generates zero added value in production. But the prime minister says that it produces vehicles, not only for Albania, but even for the UN.
In fact, what Timak Defence does is something else and not the production of vehicles. Timak Defence is the instrument through which the government eliminated competition in public tenders for the supply of vehicles to state institutions.
The army no longer buys vehicles through open tenders, where companies compete by lowering prices, but is forced to buy them only from Timak Defence, which imports vehicles from abroad at price x and sells them to the army from a monopoly position at price x plus a large margin. This is not production.
For this, the Albanian language has another word. And that word is not Besa./Kapital
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