The Hungarian Investment Promotion Agency (HIPA) honoured investments targeting Hungary in 2019 in eight categories at the ‘Investors of the Year’ gala event of which thyssenkrupp Components Technology Hungary Kft. was granted the ‘R&D Investment of the Year’ award. The prize was presented to Dóra Tagai, Head of HR of our company by Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Róbert Ésik, CEO of HIPA.

thyssenkrupp started its activities in Hungary in 1999 and has been engaged in research and development activities since then. The electric and electronic (E/E) competence centre in Budapest operates as the global development centre of thyssenkrupp AG. In 2019 the R&D workforce increased by 66 people, thereby our company now employs more than 900 highly qualified Hungarian engineers, who have gained international recognition with the development of electromechanical steering systems.

Each year at the „Investors of the Year” award ceremony the companies executing the most considerable investments of the previous year are being recognized together with a Hungarian supplier and an industrial park.

The Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) and thyssenkrupp started a joint development twenty years ago. Three PhD students were asked by the German company to prepare the working model of an electromechanical steering system.  The system was ready in a couple of months and was presented in December in a stadium’s parking lot in Eschen, the hometown of thyssenkrupp Steering business unit. From then on, the work continued officially, the result of which is the E/E (electrical and electronic) competence centre in Budapest, which employs more than 900 highly qualified engineers today and is regarded as unique even in thyssenkrupp. The competence centre is considered to be one of the best of its kind in the world and assembles steering systems for the world’s greatest car factories, such as BMW, Daimler, and SGMW, the Chinese joint venture of General Motors. thyssenkrupp celebrated the 20th anniversary where it all began – at the university.  

The Budapest-based E/E (electrical and electronic) Competence Centre of thyssenkrupp, a unique establishment even within the company itself, is moving to a larger site, the South Buda Business Park located in the 11th district of South Buda, due to the company’s continued expansion. The automotive development centre, which employs nearly 900 highly qualified engineers, was founded 20 years ago by thyssenkrupp and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics to implement a Hungarian idea. During the development project, a “smart” electromechanical steering servo has been developed, which is more reliable, less energy consuming than conventional servos and is capable of working with a wide variety of driver assistance or autonomous driving systems.  Today, new applications are also being developed, such as steer-by-wire (a solution that provides solely electronic connections instead of mechanical ones) or own self-driving systems.   Within a few years, the Centre has become an international leader and is today ranked among the best worldwide in its field.

“This change marks a significant milestone in our lives: when I came to Hungary, we had barely forty employees at the Development Centre, and today we have nine hundred engineer colleagues working in Budapest, whose work I am particularly proud of” said Marc de Bastos Eckstein, Managing Director of thyssenkrupp Components Technology Hungary. 

Moving will take several steps and months, and the most difficult task will probably be to build the labs. The environment, that is by nearly a third larger in size than the present site, will be designed to support the agile software development approach used here and to make collaboration among staff members even more effective. 

thyssenkrupp is the most intensive industrial and technological investor in Hungary. In addition to the E/E Competence Centre, the company is also engaged in manufacturing and assembly work in Hungary:  In Jászfényszaru, electromechanical steering servos and cylinder head integrated camshafts are produced, whereas in Debrecen stabilizers and springs are manufactured by the company. A chassis assembly plant and a Steel Service Centre are in operation in Győr, and the construction of an engine parts factory involving a greenfield investment of about HUF 17 billion in Pécs will begin this year.

Environmental protection is an important element of our corporate strategy. We are not only interested in our wider but narrower environment as well, so we have organized waste collection with our colleagues in the vicinity of our Budapest Competence Center. A result, in a couple of hours we collected 4 cubic meters of garbage, most of which were cigarette butts, plastic and glass bottles and plastic packaging materials.

As our Group Policy on Environment and Energy declares thyssenkrupp AG and its Group companies regard environmental protection and the responsible use of energy and resources as important corporate objectives. Following this rule, we also introduced the plastic free April when we also got rid of plastic cups and decreased the usage of plastic food containers and made colleagues aware how to handle plastic waste.  

We organized Tomorrow Day, an open day for the first time in Budapest on 9 May, 2018 in our E/E Competence Center. The purpose of the event was to provide insights into the work of our unique competence center and the more than 700 engineer colleagues.  Besides university students, professors and experienced professionals interested in hardware close software development, our colleagues were also invited to the programs of the open day. The day was split into two parts: in the morning the live final of Coding Tomorrow Cup programming competition for software developers began, where 10 groups had the chance to compare their knowledge. The coding tasks compiled by our engineers included exciting logical tasks, laboratory-related puzzles and even tasks connected to our Mercedes C-Klasse autonomous driving car. In the afternoon, different departments of the competence center were introduced in a series of interesting presentations. Later, the guests and our colleagues could participate at the well-known university professor, Károly Härtlein’s impressive performance called „Brutal physics”. The show put shed light on the most exciting side of physics by various experiments, which cannot be presented in educational environment. Finally, Marc de Bastos Eckstein, General Manager of thyssenkrupp Components Technology Hungary handed over the prizes to the winners of the programming competition, and the event was closed by the concert of the popular Cloud 9+ band. During the open day, the participants could also try parking via a mobile application, drive a special racing car simulator with VR glasses on site or take part in job interview rehearsals.

The Craft international software developer conference has been held by IBM Budapest Lab and Prezi in Budapest in April of every year since 2014. The aim of the increasingly popular event is to showcase the latest – theoretical and practical – innovations and technologies forming essential parts of the tool-kit used by any successful software developer (or company).

This year, the conference was hosted at the Magyar Vasúttörténeti Park (Hungarian Railway History Park) between 25 and 28 April, with more than 25 workshops held on the first two days at various locations in Budapest, while the last two days focused on sessions at the aforementioned, wonderfully unique location. This year saw the largest Craft event to date, drawing almost 2,000 visitors from 46 countries, all coming to learn from the best lecturers and practical experts in the software developer community.

This year, we were present as platinum sponsors at Craft, where we also announced a surprise challenge: our programming competition proved to be at least as popular among participants as the freshly-squeezed orange juice on offer at our booth. Many attendees were also very interested in our self-driving Mercedes C200 model, which we used to showcase our developments with self-driving vehicles.

On the second day of the conference, as part of the “Eclipse/ToolMakers’ Day” workshop, Gergely Pintér, the Head of AUTOSAR and the Fail-Operational Platform Department, as well as Máté Kovács, one of our highly talented software engineers, gave lectures to Hungarian and international participants in the topic of “Model-Based Development and Code Generation for Automotive Embedded Systems”.

As part of Craft 2017, an opening exhibition under the name of ‘Street of the Future’ was open for viewing on 22-23 April in Madách tér in downtown Budapest. The goal of the free and open event was to present the latest innovations by Hungarian high-tech firms, and to make these innovations shaping our future available to all. In addition to our booth, the exhibition also allowed visitors to inspect the vehicle showcased at the Craft event, and naturally our colleagues were happy to talk about our newest results, offering interesting facts to children and grown-ups alike.

Who knows, we might even get to welcome some of those sparkling eyes to our company in just a few years’ time!