AUTONEWS

BMW WILL HAVE A NEW FACTORY IN EUROPE:IN HUNGARY

The last plant that the BMW Group inaugurated on European soil was the plant located in Leipzig, Germany, in 2000. After that, to improve its production capacity on the European continent, they simply expanded the facilities that already had active, introducing basically new equipments. That did not stop the German automobile group from raising other manufacturing centers from scratch, such as in China, the United States and Brazil.With the difficulties that are emerging in the United States, due to the economic policy and tariff of President Donald Trump, the Germans decided to open a new industrial center of the BMW Group in Europe. They have confirmed that they will invest 1 billion euros to build a new production plant in the Hungarian town of Debrecen. The reason for choosing this site has to do with the arrival of several commercial agreements worth 1.4 billion euros for suppliers in the region.Harald Krüger, Chairman of the Board of the BMW Group, stated: "The decision of the BMW Group to build this new plant reaffirms our prospects for global growth. After significant investments in China, Mexico, the United States and Brazil, we are strengthening our activities in Europe to maintain a balance of world production between Asia, America and our continent of origin. "He continued: "Europe is the biggest production site of the BMW Group. Only in 2018 have we invested more than 1 billion euros in our German centers to update them and prepare them for electric mobility. "Today, the European market represents 45% of the BMW Group's worldwide sales, or 1.1 million units. The growth in sales of the consortium in markets such as USA, China, Mexico and Brazil, can be met with the industrial centers of these areas. However, it is necessary to meet the demand of its home market, where up to now this year growth has increased by 1.2%.Work to build this new production center in Hungary will begin in the second half of 2019. Thanks to this, more than one thousand direct jobs will be created, resulting from an installed initial production capacity of 150,000 units per year. For the time being it is unknown which models of the group could be manufactured in these facilities, but taking into account that its executives talk a lot about electrification, the electric family 'i' would be a good candidate.