Serbia will head up the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA) in 2024 and boost regional connectivity and trade relations to benefit economies and people’s quality of life, Serbian Trade Minister Tomislav Momirovic said at the CEFTA Week 2023 conference in the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica on Thursday. With
Bulgarian populist formation There Is Such a People (ITN) has declared its intention to align with the centre-right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) if it wins seats at the EU elections next June. Formed 2 years ago and currently polling at around 5%, ITN stands a real chance of securing
Hungary’s Indotek Group acquired a 47% stake in the French grocery hypermarket chain Auchan last week. Group founder-owner Daniel Jellinek, one of Hungary’ s richest men, said Auchan could realistically now become a top-three player on the Hungarian retail market. It is currently the ninth largest retail chain in
The EU has selected seven projects to co-fund 5G transport corridors connecting regions throughout Europe, improving road, rail, inland waterways, and multimodal transport. They will support 5G infrastructure deployment over cross-border sections of 5G corridors and ensure service continuity when border crossing. Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is well represented
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has reiterated his stance that Russia’s war with Ukraine is insoluble, stoking fears that he could form part of a pro-Kremlin lobby in the EU. After meeting with Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, Fico called the war a “frozen conflict” that cannot be solved
US rating agency Moody’s Investors Service has increased its outlook for Czechia from negative to stable, meaning a rating deterioration is not expected in the foreseeable future. Moody’s justified this as mainly due to Czechia’s significant reduction of risk in connection with gas supplies from Russia. The
US pharmaceutical firm Pfizer has initiated legal proceedings against the Polish government, asserting that it failed to fulfil payment obligations for some 60mn doses of its COVID-19 vaccine. The litigation, scheduled for its preliminary court hearing on December 6, centres around the contentious contract between Pfizer and the European Commission
Bulgaria placed bottom in the EU for recycling disused ICT devices, in a survey conducted in 2022 by EU official statistics office Eurostat. Only 3.4% recycle their old desktop computers in Bulgaria. Sweden (29%) recycles the most old desktop computers, ahead of the Netherlands (27%). Austria was the highest
The European Commission (EC) proposed a shortcut for Hungary to nearly EUR 1bn from its revised national recovery plan on Thursday 23 November. The plan details spending for the EU’s one-off supplementary recovery fund, which, like most EU member states, the Hungarian government began to revise in August. The
Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) intends to fulfil the conditions set by the European Commission (EC) to open accession negotiations before the end of the year, BiH leader Borjana Kristo said in an interview with Euractiv. She was speaking after a EC candidates’ progress report gave BiH a conditional green light
Romania will not levy new taxes next year, Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu pledged on Thursday 16 November, with parliamentary elections expected in around a year. “I said very clearly that there will be no new taxes next year,” Ciolacu said at the opening of a government meeting. “I want
Hungary remained the EU’s most inflationary economy with an annual rate of 9.6% in October, an EU statistics office Eurostat report released Friday 17, November revealed. On the upside, this was the first time Hungary’s inflation rate had fallen to single digits since April 2022. The EU’
Hungarian operator 4iG Group revealed a plan to streamline operations and bring in external investors to raise the overall value of the group to HUF400bn (USD 1.15bn). In a statement, 4iG Chairman Gellert Jaszai said: “One of the key objectives of the transformation process is to monetise the excess
The number of ICT industry offers decreased by as much as 43% in the first half of 2023, according to the sector job website Inhire, local media reported. The crisis has arrived from abroad, according to Gazeta Wyborcza, as the Polish IT industry relies largely on orders from elsewhere in
Confirming the preliminary expectations, Hungarian energy giant MOL announced in the summer that it will start mining lithium, local business website Portfolio reports. The planning of the project goes back to 2019. In August, MOL Managing Director Gyorgy Bacsa announced that trial lithium extraction would begin next year in the
Automotive and Transport has dropped to third place amongst large companies in CEE, as business sectors of Central and Eastern European (CEE) shifted in size, partly due to soaring commodities prices, the latest Coface CEE Top 500 study found. In its 15th annual study, the French insurance company collects data
Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu visited Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia from November 6-12, deepening bilateral ties in the Baltics and putting Asian geopolitics back up the agenda in Central and Eastern European (CEE). The three Baltic states have adjusted their policy toward People’s Republic of China (PRC) in recent
Ranked number four in the Global Fintech Index Ranking – and with more than 260 fintech companies and 7,000 professionals – Lithuania is an industry leader in continental Europe. Now the Baltic country’s government is seeking to secure this position with a new five-point plan. In 2014, Lithuania had 55
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is becoming increasingly diversified, ING Bank writes in a new report on Poland, Czechia, Romania and Hungary. This diversification includes economic outlooks, inflation profiles and reaction functions of central banks, the Dutch bank added in its report entitled “One region but very different stories for
Volkswagen is putting its plans to construct a new electric vehicle (EV) “gigafactory” in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) on hold due to a decline in demand EVs, VW Group Chairman Oliver Blume revealed. The group, which already has three gigafactories, had been considering the construction of a fourth, with
A memorandum of understanding (MOU) signing between Hungary’s 4iG and China’s Huawei, both controversial companies close to their respective governments, has provoked anger from the US government. Huawei and 4iG say they want to play a pivotal role in the global race for high-speed 5G data transmission. The
The EU will finance Western Balkans (WB) integration reforms to the tune of EUR 6bn, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Skopje, north Macedonia, on Monday. “These reforms will come with investment,” von der Leyen said during a press conference with North Macedonia Prime Minister Dimitar Kovacevski.
The groundbreaking 500 kW NAS battery-based energy storage system (ESS) has been successfully put into operation at windows, doors and blinds manufacturer Rollplast’s plant in Kostinbrod, 15km from Sofia, west Bulgaria. At the Kostinbrod plant, two containerized units have been deployed and the NAS system in integrated with rooftop
The European Central Bank (ECB) left interest rates unchanged this week for the first time in over a year. Thursday was the bank’s first meeting with no change after increases back to July 2022 that pushed the ECB interest rate to a high of 4%. As inflation falls, the
Incoming Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico did not waste time to state his positions on the war in Ukraine when he spoke to members of the press in Brussels on Thursday, 26 October. “The conflict in Ukraine is not our affair, and we are not involved in it,” the Slovak