​The Chinese company BYD and the Hungarian state are close to announcing a major investment in the construction of an electric car plant in Szeged, a city located 175 km from Budapest and 100 km from Arad. The investment will amount to about billions of euros and will become the largest plant of the Chinese car manufacturer in Europe, writes the Financial Times.

The discussions lasted for several months, and BYD considered several European countries for the mega-plant: France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Hungary.

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BYD will also make batteries for electric vehicles, which it is very good at, so the investment will be large.

Hungary has attracted large investments in the automotive sector thanks to Viktor Orbán’s policy of providing large subsidies. Infrastructure is also very important, as well as labor force, which is much cheaper than in the West.

Hungary is part of China’s One Belt One Road infrastructure project, and one of the projects that is also funded by China is the new Budapest-Belgrade railway.

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BYD has a small bus factory in Hungary.

BYD is a huge company, which, according to its own data, employs more than 630,000 people. It will end the year having produced almost two million electric cars, and in Europe there are five models in the range, priced from 30,000 to 72,000 euros.

Since 2022, BYD has entered several European countries, and compared to a decade ago, the quality of the company’s cars has improved significantly, more and more technologies are appearing on them, a lot of work has been done on exterior design, and European designers also work at BYD.

The most optimistic analysis of the market shows that Chinese brands can get 15% of the European market for fully electric cars, and BYD can sell not a few thousand electric cars per year, but 500,000.