The construction works on the site where the industrial park in Valaliky will stand. (source: TASR)
When representatives of the Eduard Heger government announced a major investment by Volvo Cars in July 2022, the mayor of Valaliky, a village near the site of a planned new industrial park, was not surprised.
“The village of Valaliky had designated the area in question as an industrial park in its master plan more than 20 years ago,” Štefan Petrík, mayor of the village, which is 15-minutes’ drive from the eastern Slovak city of Košice, told The Slovak Spectator.
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The location had once been offered to automaker PSA, but it eventually decided to build its car manufacturing plant in Trnava, in western Slovakia. And when BMW was considering nearby Haniska as the site for a potential investment, its prospective subcontractors were expected to be located in Valaliky, he added.
Representatives of the industrial park and the Košice Self-Governing Region, and other observers, point to several advantages the locality offers investors, while the arrival of Volvo Cars is also expected to benefit the whole wider region.
“We consider the decision to place the industrial park in Valaliky a positive new impulse for the development of the economy of the whole of eastern Slovakia,” Katarína Miňová, regional manager of the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Slovakia, told The Slovak Spectator.
In her opinion, the arrival of Volvo Cars and related supplier investments will be the fourth major transformation of Košice and the local region. The previous three were the arrival of U.S. Steel and the related development of industrial production, the arrival of Deutsche Telekom IT Solutions Slovakia and the subsequent growth in the local IT sector, and Košice’s selection as European Capital of Culture in 2013.
Apart from the expected benefits of the new investment, Miňová also pointed to the challenges it will bring, as well as steps that have to be taken before Volvo launches the project.
