South Wales finally landed the inward investment prize of the decade yesterday when Welsh Secretary William Hague signed LG Group Ltd to invest a formidable $2,640m to build two factories in Newport, Gwent and bring 6,100 permanent jobs to the area. The British Broadcasting Corp jumped the gun and reported in May that Wales had won the plant – not a sensible thing to do with something as sensitive as inward investment. As well as the expected semiconductor plant, LG International will be building a cathode ray tube and monitor plant on the 250-acre site; construction is due to start in October. The deal is the largest single investment in Europe by a non-European company, and the largest overseas investment in the history of any Korean company, LG said. LG Electronics will kick off with a $350m investment in a plant to produce 2m monitors a year, 3m cathode ray tubes, 3m deflection yokes and 3m fly-back transformers. LG Semicon, a quoted company 54% owned by LG Electronics, will fabricate 30,000 8 wafers of multimedia chips a month from 1999.
