How a small Hungarian town became the PC giant's European manufacturing base
According to reports from the "Belt and Road" and other media on the 14th, Lenovo Group's Hungary factory was officially completed and put into production on the same day. The factory is located in Ullo, near the capital Budapest, covering an area of 50,000 square meters, equivalent to seven footballs. It is one of Lenovo's largest overseas manufacturing plants and its first self-owned production base in Europe. According to the report, the base mainly produces server infrastructure, storage systems and high-end PC workstations. It can produce more than 1,000 servers and 4,000 workstations per day, and its products are aimed at the European, Middle East and African (EMEA) market.
It is reported that the factory, which started construction in September 2020, is the latest layout of Lenovo Group along the “Belt and Road” in addition to the “Iron Triangle” Hefei, Wuhan and Shenzhen factories in China.
Hungary is the largest producer of electronic products in Central and Eastern Europe. The output value of the computer electronics industry in 2020 will be 13 billion US dollars, which has obvious radiation to the EMEA market. Taking Lenovo Group as an example, about a quarter of its total revenue comes from the EMEA market. In the past ten years, Lenovo PC’s market share in this region has jumped from 5% to 24%, and will surpass HP for the first time in 2021, reaching the top spot. one. According to statistics, China's cumulative investment in Hungary has exceeded 5.5 billion US dollars, accounting for half of China's investment in the entire Central and Eastern European countries.
In 2015, Hungary became the first country in Europe to jointly build the Belt and Road Initiative with China, and the first country in Central and Eastern Europe to set up a RMB clearing bank. The Hungarian government has also given many preferential policies to Chinese companies. Hungarian Foreign Minister Sijardo once introduced that the construction of Lenovo's Hungarian factory cost 8.2 billion Hungarian forints (about 26.3 million US dollars), of which 2 billion forints came from the Hungarian government funding. He also said that Lenovo's decision reflects the trust that leading technology companies place in Hungary. At the end of 2020, Shenzhen Kodali Company announced that it would build a lithium battery production plant in Hungary. The local government spent 500 million forints to build a dedicated road to facilitate quick access to the factory.
Since the epidemic, sea and air transportation have been blocked from time to time, and the capacity of China-Europe freight trains has been increasing. As Hungary is located in the center of Europe, almost all routes of the China-Europe freight train must pass through, which further promotes the investment and business development of Chinese enterprises in Hungary.
According to reports, Lenovo's Uro factory in Hungary, like its "zero-carbon factory" built in Tianjin and other places in China, has adopted a large number of green and environmentally friendly designs: the solar panels configured in the factory area can provide enough power for a small village. At the same time, the factory also applies green manufacturing processes such as low-temperature solder paste welding, which can reduce carbon emissions by 35%. This conforms to the direction of high-quality development of the "Belt and Road", and is also a new footprint for Chinese enterprises to explore and jointly build a green "Belt and Road".
Article/picture source: Sina
