Historic deal: Szeged in Hungary sells land to Chinese BYD for nearly EUR 30 million

Szeged has handed over the second parcel of land for the construction of Chinese EV maker BYD’s plant, Mayor László Botka said at a municipal council meeting on Friday.

New BYD factory in Szeged

Botka said that the 161-hectare parcel was handed over at the start of October after it had been cleared of old munitions and an archaeological survey had been completed. The electricity grid at the site is being replaced and expanded, he added. One more parcel of land, with an area of 15 hectares, will be handed over for the BYD plant by year-end, he said.

BYD will pay for the land, and the local council will use the proceeds from the sale to repay state support used to acquire the parcels and develop the area, Deputy Mayor Tamás Kovács said. According to 24.hu, the price of the land is HUF 11 billion 888 million (EUR 29,710,000). BYD has announced plans to spend several billion euros to build its first plant in Europe in Szeged. The factory will have the capacity to turn out 300,000 vehicles a year.

Visual plan of how the BYD factory in Szeged will look:

Szijjártó: Restrictions on cooperation between European car makers, Asian suppliers harmful

Any measure that threatens the electromobility strategy of European car makers and restricts cooperation with Asian suppliers would have a negative impact on the continent’s economy, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó said at an informal meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council in Trade Formation in Budapest on Friday, his ministry said in a statement.

In a speech opening the meeting, Szijjártó said the global economy was undergoing fundamental changes, in part due to the European Union’s decision to make the switch to electromobility in light of road transport’s share of global emissions. That decision “completely changed” the structure and nature of economic and trade ties between the EU and China, he added.

Szijjártó said China and Chinese companies were “indispensable” to the supply chain of the green automotive industry. He welcomed big European car makers’ adaptation to the situation, pointing to their development of competitive electric vehicles, but said they had failed to keep in step with Asian, mainly Chinese, battery makers. He warned that any measure restricting cooperation between Western companies and their Asian suppliers threatened the adoption of car makers’ strategy in the new era and that would weigh on the entire European economy.

He noted that an EU measure introducing punitive tariffs on Chinese EVs had been supported by just ten member states and opposed by five, showing a lack of consensus. He said it was worth weighing the impact of the measure on a country with which bilateral trade with the EU reached EUR 740bn last year. He added that Beijing already had retaliatory measures in its sights. He pointed to Hungary, home to manufacturing bases of all three premium German car brands and plants of five of the ten biggest battery makers in the world, as an example of the mutual benefits yielded by industrial cooperation between East and West.

Read also:

• BYD to cooperate with Hungarian education institutions
• BYD to have its first European electric car plant in Hungary