Slovak government officials are confident the country will succeed in securing the €1.1 billion investment Hyundai Motor plans to make in a new European plant.
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A Dow Jones report said Hyundai has short-listed Slovakia and Poland for a new plant, initially expected to make Kia-branded vehicles – Hyundai is scheduled to make its announcement at the Geneva motor show, which begins this week.
“We have done all we could to win,” Slovak Economics Minister Pavol Rusko reportedly told a news conference. “We will know the result tomorrow.”
An official at the government-sponsored Slovak Investment and Trade Development Agency, or SARIO, reportedly said that Hyundai is likely to choose Slovakia.
“We have had strong indications from Hyundai that it is going to be us, but haven’t heard anything officially yet,” the official, who asked to remain anonymous, told Dow Jones Newswires.
The decision by Hyundai could strengthen the position of Slovakia as the region’s fast-growing car-manufacturing hub, along with its neighbouring Czech Republic, the report said, noting that Peugeot last year chose Slovakia for a €700 million assembly plant while Volkswagen, the largest car-maker in Slovakia, builds Touareg SUVs and Golf hatchbacks at its plant west of Bratislava.
The possible defeat of Poland in its bidding for the new Hyundai plant would be the second blow in recent years for the country’s attempts to attract a large vehicle assembly plant built by a major carmaker – in 2002, Toyota and PSA picked the Czech Republic over Poland for their joint €1.5 billion plant investment.
Nonetheless, Poland has attracted a Toyota gearbox plant, in Walbrzych, Dolnoslaskie province, that began production of up to 250,000 transmissions a year in 2002 and, last year, announced plans to increase gearbox output to 300,000 and build 250,000 petrol engines a year for supply to the Czech PSA-Toyota joint venture from 2004.
A separate plant in Jelcz-Laskowice, about 25km southeast of Poland’s fourth-largest city of Wroclaw, will this year start building up to 150,000 two-litre diesel engines a year to supply Toyota’s European car assembly plants in Turkey and England.
