Hungarian investments in Singapore exceed USD 350 m

Despite the vast geographical distance between the two countries, everything is in place to further develop economic cooperation between Hungary and Singapore, Péter Szijjártó, the minister of foreign affairs and trade, said in Singapore on Wednesday.

Addressing a Hungarian-Singaporean IT business forum, Szijjártó said the government will provide all the support needed to further boost bilateral economic cooperation, expressing hope that the successes in economic ties would encourage further cooperation and result in mutually beneficial business agreements.

Bilateral trade turnover between the two countries reached one billion US dollars last year, and has increased by 46 percent so far this year, Szijjártó said, according to a foreign ministry statement.

Hungarian businesses have invested USD 350 billion in the city state, while Singaporean companies employ more than 7,000 people in Hungary, he said.

As a country of 10 million without a coastline or an abundance of natural resources, Hungary relies on the performance of its people, Szijjártó said, underscoring the importance of the ongoing shift to a knowledge-based economy.

At the beginning of the previous decade, Hungary’s government focused on large-scale industrialisation with a view to creating jobs, he said. But now it is shifting its focus to quality over quantity, to increasing value added and the economy’s general level of technological development, he added.

He praised the success of the government’s policy of opening up to the East, emphasising that while politically Hungary’s place was in NATO and the European Union, the government had recognised in time that Eastern countries were set to play an increasingly important role.

Despite difficult circumstances, Hungary in recent years has seen record investments, the minister said.

He attributed this to Hungary’s “exceptional” political stability in the European context. Hungary’s central location on the continent is also advantageous, as is the fact that it has the lowest taxes. But the country’s biggest advantage, he said, was its skilled workforce, which he said was set to become even more attractive to foreign businesses thanks to the reorganisation of the higher education system and the introduction of dual vocational training.

Fully 63 percent of the Hungarian industry is considered high-tech according to international standards, Szijjártó said, welcoming that spending on research and development has increased to 1.6 percent of GDP from less than 1 percent in ten years, while the number of R+D jobs has increased by 97 percent.

Source: MTI