BYD will hugely increase e-truck and e-bus production in Hungary due to new factory
The Chinese player plans to invest about $94 million in the construction of a new plant located in Komárom. This will allow BYD to triple its local production capacity to 1,250 electric buses and trucks annually, as reported by our sister magazine Sustainable Bus.
BYD will build a brand-new facility in northern Hungary. The Chinese player plans to invest about $94 million in the construction of a new plant located in Komárom. This will allow BYD to triple its local production capacity to 1,250 electric buses and trucks annually, as reported by our sister magazine Sustainable Bus. The investment was also celebrated by BYD itself with the following video on its Youtube channel.
Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Péter Szijjártó, emphasized the strategic value of the partnership between Hungary and China. “We Hungarians do not consider East-West cooperation a threat, but rather an opportunity, a big opportunity,” Szijjártó said, adding that the Hungarian government will support the project with a 3.1 billion forint grant (around 7.7 million euros).
BYD to rely on Hungary in order to serve the European e-vehicle market
Under the leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Budapest has actively courted Chinese capital, particularly in the fields of electric mobility and battery manufacturing. In this latter segment, Márton Nagy, national economy minister of Hungary stated at a press event in September 2023 that the government has plans to build up an annual battery production capacity of 250 GWh in the next few years, which, according to him, would cover 35 percent of the European needs and would put the country to the fourth place worldwide, right after China, the United States and Germany.
Indeed, by November 2023, battery production capacity in Hungary reportedly already reached 87 GWh/year, not including the newest SK Innovation plant, which is expected to begin production soon and to provide an additional output of 30 GWh/year alone when operating on full throttle. BYD currently leads the Italian e-van market, thanks to its eTP3 van model.
According to Szijjártó, “Hungary received nearly a third of all Chinese inward investment into Europe last year,” bringing the total stock of Chinese investment in the country to 5.5 trillion forints (around $16 billion), across 64 large-scale projects.
