Daewoo Electronics Co which is taking over Thomson Multimedia SA says it plans to invest $1.5bn by 2000 to make electronic parts in France, creating 5,000 new jobs. The French prime minister’s office said Daewoo’s offer entailed a commitment to preserve Thomson Multimedia jobs in France and create additional jobs. All the French jobs at Thomson will be preserved and we will focus on cutting production costs by 10% for the normalization of operations, Daewoo said. It wants Thomson to retain all its own brand name products in the US but to cut the number marketed in Europe to about two. Thomson Multimedia made losses of $284m last year. North America represents 64% of Thomson Multimedia’s sales and in the US alone, Daewoo will have a 20. 5% share of the US market for televisions, which will be increasingly important once they go digital and become intelligent. Meantime, Syseca SA, the software and computer services arm of Thomson-CSF SA, is not expected to be retained by Lagarderes.
