Prime Minister Viktor Orbán met with Chinese electric car maker BYD’s leaders on Saturday to discuss the company's investments in Hungary.
According to MTI, BYD’s construction of its first European plant in Szeged, in southern Hungary, is one of the most important investments in Hungary’s economic history. The multi-billion euro investment will bring new technologies to Hungary create thousands of jobs, and will also benefit local suppliers. PM Orbán said his government wanted the positive impact of the investment to also be felt by the locals. To this end, the government is launching billions of forints worth of infrastructure development projects that will include the road network, the public utility network as well as community services, he added. The sides noted that Hungary has been China’s number one CEE investment destination for years. Hungary has built a predictable and stable partnership based on mutual respect with China over the past decade, and bilateral economic and trade cooperation has been setting new records year after year, they said.
Meanwhile, Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, told a BYD ceremony in Budapest on Friday that China’s BYD, the world’s biggest electric vehicle maker completing a plant in Hungary, has helped the country to a position in which it will “set the pace for a global technological revolution rather than lag behind others." Electric car making will be a greatly decisive factor in the European economy, and the BYD project will ensure “a long-term guarantee for Hungary’s economy to stay on a growth path”, the minister said. The project also demonstrates the success of the government’s Eastern Opening strategy: “We realised in time that the eastern economies will not only close the gap with the West very soon but they will surpass western ones in some areas,” he added. “In Europe, there is a huge competition for Chinese projects using cutting-edge technologies and offering thousands of jobs,” Szijjártó said. “We entered the competition in time … and Hungary has now become the number one destination for Chinese investments in central Europe,” he said, adding that after 2020, Hungary in 2023 had again received the highest FDI from China in the region.