Within the framework of the largest ever investment in Hungary, worth approximately HUF 3,000 billion, the Chinese Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL) will create 9,000 new jobs in Debrecen, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó announced on Monday.
At the event held in the city of Hajdúság, the head of the department called the sale and purchase agreement signed for the plots a milestone, saying that this is the project's first legally binding agreement.
He reported that the world's largest battery manufacturer chose Hungary to build its second European plant after two and a half years of negotiations, following huge international competition. He emphasized that this is not only a huge amount on a domestic scale, it is one of the five largest green field investments in Europe in the last ten years.
"After China and Germany, we will be the third country in the world to have a CATL factory." He then added that the project will also receive state support, the details of which will be made public later, after the notification process at the European Commission has been completed.
Furthermore, he underlined that, apart from Germany and China, all three major German premium car brands, Audi, BMW and Mercedes, are the only ones with production bases in Hungary, which assign an important role to our country in their electromobility strategy, so the planned construction until 2025 must be hastened, because a large the demand for batteries.
Péter Szijjártó stated that the current situation in Europe gives the occasion even more special significance, since perhaps never before has the world economy been turned upside down twice in such a short period of time, as it is now with the coronavirus epidemic and the war in Ukraine.
"Energy prices have skyrocketed to irrational heights, inflation has reached double digits in the vast majority of European countries, the European economy has clearly gone into recession and we are facing a worldwide food supply crisis," he pointed out.
According to him, it is a clear proof of the performance of Hungarian economic policy that the two largest investments ever were announced in these two "black years" of the world economy, last year and this year.
He stated: these show that neither the war nor the epidemic could break the two fundamental processes taking place in the world economy, the automotive revolution and the increasingly radical global rise of Eastern companies. "We recognized both processes, we responded correctly to both processes," he said.
He reminded that the performance of the Hungarian automotive industry has increased two and a half times since 2010, and its production value in 2021 was close to HUF 9,500 billion.
The minister believed that the opening to the east proved successful despite the attacks. "We have made it clear that we are not willing to ban any nation's companies for any reason. We have placed our foreign policy as a whole and our relations with the world to the east on the basis of mutual respect," he declared.
"Hungary benefits very, very much from the pragmatic cooperation with the People's Republic of China, based on mutual respect and free from external influences," underlined Péter Szijjártó
Source and full article: Magyar Hírlap
Featured image: MTI/János Vajda
