A little company history first. The predecessor was founded in 1951 as Tanácsi Építőipari Vállalat and, over the following decades, was one of the county's most significant construction companies. In 1991–92 it became a wholly Hungarian-owned company, and from then on the market and the public knew it as Hunép. By the early 2010s the construction business had established several companies in the interest of standing on more than one leg, and their wide-ranging activities were becoming hard to follow. At that point the company's CEO, Gyula Szűcs, judged the time right to reorganise Hunép for the sake of a clearer profile, transparency and efficiency. In 2013 the companies were reorganised into asset management structures. The asset managers provide the equity and financing behind the Group's member companies and continuously monitor and analyse how those businesses perform.
Watching the market, and acting
– Szinorg is itself an asset manager, created by a spin-off from Hunép. Our motto is "Asset management through creating new value". The Szinorg group has several activities, with construction the priority, represented by three companies. The most significant and longest-established is Hunép; alongside it is a Budapest company of 14 years' standing, and the third works in a specialist part of the industry, namely glass walls and curtain walling. Szinorg's other very substantial leg is real-estate development, for which we continuously establish project companies. We built the ten-year strategy now beginning on top of the city's next ten-year programme – Gyula Szűcs, the company's Chairman and CEO and chairman of the board, began his account of Szinorg Universal Zrt.'s strategic thinking.
Residential development on Simonyi út
– We want to take part not only in delivering the projects initiated by Debrecen's municipality, but also to keep watching for ourselves which developments the city needs and which of those it cannot afford to fund. It is our role, our responsibility and our opportunity to take those on, deliver them ourselves and then operate them. But we have ideas for other parts of the country too. We have everything needed for that: development experience, our own capital against which we can borrow, construction capacity to deliver, and a company that manages property. There are many sites in the city where we believe development will be badly needed over the next ten years. Debrecen, for example, is very poorly served by accommodation of an appropriate standard. We have taken the first step there: we are building the hotel on Bajcsy-Zsilinszky utca. New, good-quality apartments are also needed, whether to provide homes or to serve the rental market. Although there is currently an office surplus in Debrecen, significant office demand will emerge in the city within this decade, and we want to be part of that too. Many industrial companies are establishing themselves here. Plants and logistics buildings will be needed as well. Some of the arrivals want to lease space to manufacture in. Through a company jointly owned with a Debrecen partner we bought a site in the Southern Industrial Park. We will begin building a hall of 10,000–15,000 square metres there next year, for which we await tenants. We are in the market; we have the experience and the knowledge. We are always examining demand, analysing the market, and where something is needed, we act — alone or with a partner – said Gyula Szűcs.
In contrast to the slowdown visible in construction contracting, there is no let-up in the property development projects. Gyula Szűcs put it this way: – The developments we decided on two years ago we will certainly carry out. The pandemic has no effect on them; we are moving ahead, the property acquisitions for the developments are going through, the studies are being prepared, the design work is proceeding, and within a foreseeable period the first ground will be broken. The simple reason is that property development can only be done by thinking long term — and we have always thought long term.
Zsolt Kovács
Source: Gazdaság 2020