PSA/Peugeot-Citroen received a 100-kilometre (62-mile) competition exclusion zone from the Slovak government when it selected Trnava as a manufacturing site, an official close to the talks told Automotive News Europe.
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PSA’s plant in Trnava, 50km (30 miles) from the Slovakian capital of Bratislava, will have 3,500 workers and a capacity to build 300,000 cars a year when it begins production in 2006.
Other carmakers will be barred from setting up operations within the exclusion zone and siphoning of PSA’s workforce under the agreement.
“It is only a verbal agreement,” said Zuzana Karhutova, public relations manager at INVEST Trnava, the company preparing the Trnava factory site for PSA.
He said no written agreement exists between the two sides, a point reiterated by Jan Pribula, the Slovak official who is responsible for the country’s automotive sector.
Slovakia will join the EU in March. The country has become one of Europe’s most attractive locations for motor industry investment and is expected to double its car production by the end of the decade.
Slovaki’s overall motor industry sector expanded by 22.8% in 2002, with sales of 185 billion crowns or 19.7% of the country’s total industrial sales.
The PSA/Slovak agreement – written or verbal – would push other potential investors further east or north to places such as Zilina, which is competing with sites in Poland to be the home of Hyundai’s prospective €1.1 billion plant.
The PSA/Toyota plant [in the Czech Republic] is set to go on line in early 2005 with about 3,000 employees, Automotive News Europe noted.
