Mirae Asset Daewoo Securities cars and ships and operating steel works. The South Korean state encouraged large and paternalistic conglomerates to use their capital to expand into unrelated businesses, protected by high tariff barriers and arcane regulations. In this way the car and steel giant Daewoo branched out into dealing in securities. In the 1990s this strategy hit problems as South Korea opened its markets to foreign competition and at the same time the founders of these conglomerates grew too old to run their creations and passed the reins on to their less focused children. Daewoo Securities was spun off from the Daewoo Corporation
Daewoo LeMans car market in 1996. It was replaced there by the Lanos in the autumn of 1997, by which time some 40,000 examples had been sold. In Romania, manufacturing began in 1996, at the newly acquired Daewoo Automobile Romania factory in Craiova, being the first Daewoo model produced at the plant. It was offered only with the sedan body style, and was exported to most countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The GLE version, which was the full option model, included air conditioning, power steering, front and rear electric windows, fog lamps, central locking, tachometer and a cassette player stereo system.