Hungary benefits through collaboration with Chinese companies, global leaders in power battery production with cutting-edge technology, said Csaba Moldicz, head of the Center for International Economy at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium Foundation of Hungary, in a written interview with Xinhua.
The Hungarian government welcomes foreign direct investment from around the world, and provides a friendly business environment for foreign investors, he said.
Recently, the EU announced that it would launch an anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese electric vehicles.
The Chinese side has called on the EU to work together to create a fair, non-discriminatory, and predictable market environment for the common development of the China-EU electric vehicle industry.
In the expert’s view, the EU probe reflects the increasingly significant impact of geopolitics on the global economy. He questioned whether the EU’s actions were aimed at upholding “fair competition” or driven by geopolitical competition with U.S. manipulation behind the scenes.
The expert added that the EU currently lacks industrial policies that can boost the automotive industry. “Without a real industrial policy at the EU level, the EU will always have to rely on protectionism,” he said.
Moldicz said Hungary’s automotive industry, including plants invested by foreign companies like Audi, Mercedes, and Suzuki, represents cooperative opportunities for new investors.
In August of last year, Chinese power battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL) announced a plan to build a battery plant in Debrecen, eastern Hungary, with a planned investment of 7.34 billion euros (about 7.85 billion U.S. dollars) and a planned capacity of 100 gigawatt hours (GWh), producing battery cells and module products for European automakers.
Moldicz mentioned that when CATL’s investment in Hungary was announced, a Mercedes management board member stated that “with CATL we have a technology leader as our partner to provide us — as the first and biggest customer of the new plant’s initial capacity — with top-notch CO2 neutral battery cells for our next generation EVs in Europe.”
Moldicz called this project a successful example of win-win cooperation in the automotive industry between Europe and China.