In addition to battery-powered vehicles, Chinese automotive giant Build Your Dreams (BYD) will also produce plug-in hybrid electric cars in its European plants, including in Szeged, reports Világgazdaság based on Autonews.
BYD has been profiting nicely off its exports of plug-in hybrids to the European Union and the United Kingdom, becoming the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer, and now has plants and offices in more than 75 countries on six continents.
The BYD factory in Szeged will cost around $4.5 billion and will produce around 200,000 vehicles per year from the end of 2025, with total production planned for 350,000 units. The Chinese plant will be built on a 300-hectare site on the outskirts of the city, with the first vehicle expected to roll off the production line in the second half of this year.
Világgazdaság notes that BYD is facing high tariffs in the U.S. market and a 17 percent import tariff in Europe. For this reason, it is investing in local factories, such as the one in Hungary, but will also begin building a facility in Turkey, and the company’s executives have even raised the prospect of building a third European factory.
Mandiner was also invited to a recent roundtable discussion in Budapest, where Stella Li, executive vice president of BYD and head of the company’s American and European divisions, will answer questions from Hungarian journalists.
Forbes ranks Li as China’s most influential woman and one of 60 Chinese nationals who have earned recognition in North America for their outstanding work, while Time magazine also named her one of the 100 business leaders they believe can do the most to combat climate change.
Under her leadership, BYD became the largest supplier of electric commercial vehicles and energy storage in the USA, but she also reformed the public transport fleets of Chile and Colombia, and helped the corporate giant conquer the Brazilian market.
BYD announced in 2023 that it had chosen Hungary as its main European production location. The Szeged plant, which will start production this year, is planned to serve the European market with 200,000 (later up to 300,000) cars per year. The first two BYD models to be produced in Szeged will be the Dolphin and the Atto 3.
It took several years of preparatory work and 224 rounds of negotiations on the part of the Hungarian government for the world’s largest and now most technologically advanced electric car manufacturer to choose the country as its preferred European base.
The €4 billion investment is unparalleled in Hungarian economic history, and analysts believe that together with the BMW factory in Debrecen, it could boost the domestic GDP by several tenths of a percentage point, while creating ten thousand jobs. According to initial reports, BYD is offering its employees an average salary of €1,800-€2,000 (HUF 726,000-HUF 807,000 forints at the current exchange rate).
Aside from imposing punitive tariffs on imported electric cars directly from China, the European Commission recently launched an anti-subsidy investigation into BYD’s investment in Hungary, investigating whether the Chinese giant received unfair support from the Hungarian government, violating fair competition.
Mandiner points out that in 2020, 2023, and then 2024, Chinese companies brought the most investment to Hungary. With the support of the government, 54 modern Chinese large-scale investments have been made in Hungary in the last 10 years, with a total value of HUF 7 trillion, directly creating more than 30,000 new jobs.
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