Czech morning news roundup: Tuesday, November 23, 2021

The Christmas tree in Prague’s Old Town Square was put up last night, having arrived on Sunday from Dolní Černá Studnice in the Jablonec region. Work to put the tree in place in the Old Town Square started after midnight and finished at around 03:30.

Decorations of the tree will now begin, lasting until Friday. The tree was growing on a private garden in the Jizera Mountains, with Prague representatives choosing the tree as the best of 35 candidates, impressed by its size and rich branching. As usual, the owners of the tree received CZK 10,000. Due to the Covid pandemic, there will be no ceremonial lighting for the tree this year. When Christmas is over, branches from the tree will be donated to Prague Zoo as animal feed, while the trunk will be used to make furniture for care homes.

Honeywell International has announced that it plans to build a new Czech research and development facility for its Honeywell Intelligrated warehouse automation business, to meet growing demand for technologies enabling the speeding up of supply chains. The new 14,000-square-meter facility will be built on the company’s existing business site in Brno, already home to a research hub for Central and Eastern Europe.

The company said it aims to open the new R&D center in mid-2022. At the facility, hardware and software engineers will design and test warehouse automation solutions for use by logistics companies. Honeywell said it will hire dozens of highly skilled specialists over the next 18 months as the facility develops.

Prague Zoo welcomed a newborn silver gibbon on Saturday night, only the fourth baby of the species to have been born in the Czech Republic. The silver gibbon is an endangered species with less than 2,000 adults living in the wild, Prague Zoo said.

Silver gibbons are only seen in the wild on the Indonesian island of Java. Breeding in zoos has been limited, with only nine European zoos carrying out breeding programs producing only around 50 offspring. Prague’s baby silver gibbon was born to mother Alang Alang, with help from father Flip. Gibbons live monogamous lifestyles and form tight family groups; the new baby’s older sibling Abu-Abu, born in 2018, still lives with his parents.

With inflation gripping all areas of the Czech economy, it’s no surprise that the days of low cost fast food are disappearing into the past in the Czech Republic. Chains throughout the country are raising the cost of their products, with the cost of a McDonald’s cheeseburger rising for the second time in the last three months, from CZK 29 to CZK 35.

The reason for fast food price increases is a general rise in expenditures for businesses, especially for energy and raw food materials, as well as for packaging materials and employees’ wages. These increases are being driven by the Europe-wide energy crisis as well as supply chain bottlenecks caused by the pandemic and spiraling inflation in the Czech Republic.

Czech state energy provider ČEZ is set to acquire German solar power company Belectric from energy company RWE. The transaction will see ČEZ, Central and Eastern Europe’s largest utility company, expand further into the field of sustainable energy technology in accordance with its long-term strategic goals.

ČEZ applied on November 11 for approval to take over full ownership of Belectric. The German firm has to date constructed more than 460 solar projects. Germany is a focus for ČEZ in its expansion into clean energy operations; the company aims to build up a 1.5 GW renewable energy capacity by 2025, and 6 GW by 2030. ČEZ currently operates 13 power plants in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria.