Hungarian FM holds talks with US company executives

Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó has held talks with US company executives during visits in Washington, DC and New York.

He told MTI that he had met heads of the American corporation producing flavors and fragrances IFF (International Flavours and Fragrances), which is setting up a global financial services centre in Budapest, to employ 160 highly trained staff. The company, a global market leader, employs as many as 7,300 people around the world and recently bought out an Israeli firm with trade partners in Hungary, he added.

The move will further strengthen Hungary’s position in the service centres market. Including the new unit, Hungary will be home to over 110 service providers employing over 46,000 Hungarians, who are mostly highly skilled and multilingual people with university degrees,

Szijjártó said.

The US-Hungarian business council USHBC, which incorporates 14 US corporations with units in Hungary, held a meeting on Wednesday. It is partly thanks to their investments that US firms now form the second largest community of investors in Hungary, employing more than 100,000 people, he said.

The government has so far signed strategic partnerships with 12 US firms and the number will increase on Friday as a result of a Wednesday meeting with ExxonMobil executives. The company operates a service centre in Hungary employing 1,600 people who carry out accounting, auditing and tax advisory duties for the company’s units in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Szijjártó added.

He noted that a strategic cooperation deal with the company will be concluded on Friday, playing a potentially major role in Hungary’s energy diversification.

The American gas company has exploration rights at a Black Sea gas field in Romania, and if gas extraction starts there within a few years, Hungary will have a new source of energy supply thanks to the conclusion by Hungarian businesses of transport deals between 2022 and 2037.