The United States is the biggest non-European investor in Hungary and also its biggest non-European export partner, Finance Minister Mihály Varga said after attending a business forum of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hungary on Monday.
About 1,700 US companies employ around 106,000 people in the country and 14 of the Hungarian government’s strategic partners are US-owned, the minister said.
Bilateral trade grew by 2.3 percent to 5.8 billion dollars in 2019, he added.
Early this month, the US-Hungary Business Council was informed about ongoing talks on investment projects that US companies are planning to implement in Hungary, Varga noted.
Figures from the National Bank of Hungary (NBH) show the total value of US investments came to 11.6 billion euros.
Varga said the government agreed on 101 large investments with foreign and Hungarian companies in 2019, with a combined value of 1,705 billion forints (EUR 4.7bn), or 4 percent of the country’s GDP last year. The government supported these investments with grants worth 156 billion forints.
Hungary continues to have an excellent investment ratio, at 27.6 percent in the second quarter of 2020, Varga said.
Featured photo by Zoltán Máthé/MTI
