Minister announced world leader company’s investment in Hungary in a spectacular video

Péter Szijjártó, the minister of foreign affairs and trade, attended the cornerstone laying ceremony for a cathode plant in Debrecen, in eastern Hungary, built by South Korea’s EcoPro at a cost of 280 billion forints (EUR 740m).

The plant, EcoPro’s first outside of South Korea, will make around 108,000 tonnes of cathode material a year for electric vehicle batteries, the minister said at the ceremony. The investment, which will create 630 jobs, is supported by a 30 billion forint government grant, he said.

Szijjártó noted that Hungary ranks fourth globally in the manufacturing and export of batteries for electric vehicles. He said car making was undergoing a “revolutionary renewal”, adding that it was “not only an economic must … but an environmental necessity since 14 percent of global emissions is related to road traffic”. “Unless the world shifts to electric transportation in the next few years all environmental objectives, all climate and green goals will be degraded into naive illusion,” Szijjártó insisted. Such a shift requires electric vehicles, he said, adding that it needed batteries and “car makers in the West have become entirely dependent on battery producers in the East”.