Hungary

West Midlands link with IBM Hungary
Nora Banyai was an Intern with the Hereford & Worcester International Trade team in 2001 and has written the following short piece about her time with the team.

While I was studying at the Budapest Business School Faculty of International Management and Business I got a fantastic opportunity and could join Eric Brown's fabulous International Trade Team at HWChamber.
When I started I was an insider from the Hungarian market point of view but absolutely  outsider from the Herefordshire and Worcestershire's market and from work experience point of view. During my three-month placement I tried to help  businesses from the area contact trade partners in Hungary and made as many observations about running a team as I could.
I loved every minute of my internship with THE TEAM . They were not just colleagues, who gave me tasks, instructions,  but my second family who provided me good advice for my forthcoming carrier and life.
Actually all were needed right after my graduation when I joined IBM in Hungary, where I started to move up the career ladder and where I have been working for 7 years,  now as head of a department within a world wide organisation.
Honestly my first position was not so promising but very administrative in which  I had the right to collect some labels from the printers and move them from one building to another. I almost gave up, but telling the truth I was too lazy to go from one job interview to another  but not to ask for more tasks. From that point of time my real career started at IBM.
Within relatively short period of time I got a specific area within the team , then after two years I got the team leader position for it . Another two years were needed to became the head of the same department, where I started.
So I have been leading a two - team department with 12-14 people for 3 years now .  Beside managing my employee and their career path, my main task is to coordinate IBM's one of the most popular storage products' orders and their shipping from the plant quarter by quarter.
Nevertheless it should not  be the last stop of my career path, there is still other and higher position to step in. It  depends just on me ...

Hungary Social Profile

Hungary has made the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy, with a per capita income nearly two-thirds that of the EU-25 average.

The private sector accounts for more than 80% of GDP. Foreign ownership of and investment in Hungarian firms is widespread, with cumulative foreign direct investment totaling more than $200 billion since 1989.

The government's austerity measures, imposed since late 2006, have reduced the budget deficit from over 9% of GDP in 2006 to 3.3% in 2008. Hungary's impending inability to service its short-term debt - brought on by the global financial crisis in late 2008 - led Budapest to seek and receive an IMF-arranged financial assistance package worth over $25 billion.

The global economic downturn, declining exports, and low domestic consumption and fixed asset accumulation, dampened by government austerity measures, resulted in an economic contraction of 6.7% in 2009.

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