Dow Jones Newswires

                    SEOUL, South Korea -- Daewoo Motor Co. said it has cut its
                    senior-executive staff at home and abroad by 30% as a part of its
                    restructuring efforts.

                    The South Korean auto maker closed 17 bureaus led by senior
                    executives, and reduced the number of senior executives from 135 to
                    95. The company said it cut 48 senior executives in August of 1999,
                    and 45 more in January. Daewoo plans to announce additional staff cuts
                    and business restructuring measures in the near future.

                                         The number of Daewoo Motor employees who
                                         quit their jobs totaled 95 in September, up from
                                         48 in Aug. The company has approximately
                                         19,000 assembly-line and office workers.

                    Meanwhile, the company said it again failed to pay its employees salaries
                    this month because of a shortage of funds. It hasn't paid its office
                    workers for September and October, and it hasn't paid its assembly line
                    workers for October.

                    The government and creditors of Daewoo Motor are in talks with
                    General Motors Corp. in an attempt to sell the auto maker.

                    GM, which had a 15-year alliance with Daewoo that ended in 1992, has
                    long been interested in Daewoo as a way to further expand into Asia's
                    auto markets, which are starting to recover from their slump during the
                    1997-1998 Asian financial crisis.

                    GM and Daewoo Motor signed a memorandum of understanding in 1998
                    to pursue a strategic alliance. GM, the world's No. 1 car maker, was
                    prepared to make a bid to acquire Daewoo Motor last December, but its
                    creditors decided to sell the company in an auction. GM and Italy's Fiat
                    SpA submitted a joint bid to become preferred negotiating partners in
                    June, but it was rejected by a special evaluation committee in favor of a
                    $6.9 billion bid from Ford Motor Co. However, last month Ford decided
                    not to submit a final offer for Daewoo Motor, leaving creditors
                    scrambling to reopen talks with other companies. The collapse of the
                    sale scared investors by spotlighting the slow pace of corporate reform
                    in South Korea.

                    GM and Fiat both expressed a continued interest in acquiring Daewoo
                    Motor after Ford's withdrawal, but it has remained unclear how the two
                    companies would proceed. GM's agreement to begin talks to acquire
                    Daewoo Motor takes its creditors out of a serious bind. DaimlerChrysler
                    AG and Hyundai Motor Co., which bid jointly for the company in June
                    but also were rejected, said that they wouldn't bid on an outright
                    purchase of the auto maker. However, Hyundai, South Korea's largest
                    car maker, may consider acquiring parts of Daewoo's operations.

                    Daewoo Motor has been a painful drain on the country's already weak
                    financial system. Daewoo Motor is part of the conglomerate Daewoo
                    Group, which creditors decided to dismantle in August 1999 after it
                    amassed about $80 billion in liabilities. Since then, the banks have been
                    forced to lend even more money to Daewoo Motor to keep it running.
                    The Seoul government has been desperate to sell off Daewoo, hoping
                    to use the money to bail out other troubled sectors, such as the
                    banking industry.

                    If GM successfully acquires Daewoo Motor, the South Korean company
                    could give a boost to GM's presence in Asia's fast-growing car market
                    and access to the effectively closed South Korean car market, one of
                    Asia's most important. Daewoo Motor, which has about two million units
                    of annual production capacity world-wide, is also strong in Eastern
                    Europe.