The leaders of four Central European nations met Thursday in Hungary’s capital, where they urged visiting South Korean President Moon Jae-in to consider investing in a rapid train line connecting Budapest and Poland’s capital, Warsaw.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who was the host of
the prime ministers of the Visegrad Group of four Central European nations,
said at a joint news briefing that the potential rail investment was the
“largest common enterprise of the V4 countries” — a pact which includes
Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland.
“South Korea has developed technology in this field, and a
south to north travel corridor in Europe cannot be achieved if the (V4)
capitals are not connected with a rapid train,” Orban said, adding that the
rail investment aims to reduce travel time on the 800-kilometer (500-mile) line
from 12 hours to five.
“We really hope that South Korean industry will be
interested in this development,” Orban said.
The summit of V4 leaders came as Moon neared the end of a
nine-day tour of Europe, where he earlier attended the Group of 20 summit in
Rome and U.N. climate summit COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland.
At the media briefing in Budapest, each of the leaders
emphasized growing bilateral trade relations between South Korea and the V4,
which Orban said had increased 40% in the last five years and reached a record
of $20 billion last year.
Moon called the V4 a “newly emerging manufacturing hub in
Europe,” and noted that the group is the second-largest trading partner and
largest investment destination for South Korea in the European Union.
The manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles is the
“main driver of our bilateral cooperation that is growing stronger,” Moon said,
adding that South Korea would take a “leading role” in the development of
transport, energy and infrastructure in the V4 countries.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who was also
present at the summit, said that South Korea should “look at the V4 as the most
important partner in the EU.”
More than 30% of total South Korean exports to the EU end up
in the V4 countries, Morawiecki noted, adding that “we are open economies and
we expect our partners to be open as well.”
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis urged South Korea to bid
on a project to renew a nuclear power plant in Dukovany, Czech Republic, saying
that the East Asian nation has “excellent technology” and that the two
countries had already conducted “quite intensive talks.”
Prime Minister Eduard Heger of Slovakia said that the V4
aims to develop further cooperation with South Korea in the battle against COVID-19,
including the sharing of testing equipment, vaccines, ventilators and other
medical devices.
0 comments:
Post a Comment