Word: antwerp
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What is Europe's fastest-growing industrial hub? Frankfurt? Milan? London? No, by the reports of bankers and industrialists, it is Antwerp, the inland Belgian port 55 miles up the River Scheldt from the North...
...have invested $750 million in new plants since 1964, plan some $500 million more over the next three years in a city whose population (654,500) is smaller than New Orleans. This month General Motors laid the cornerstone for a $100 million factory-G.M.'s second in Antwerp-that will be the company's main European assembly point, employ more than 6,000 Belgians and turn out 300,000 Opels a year. Last week chemical-making B.A.S.F. broke ground for a plant that will ultimately be as large as the company's home base in Germany...
...Antwerp's greatest expansion is in chemicals. Belgium's own Solvay is putting up a polyethylene plant. The U.S.'s Phillips Petroleum is joining with Belgian partners in a $190 million naphtha plant and with France's Rhone-Poulenc in another venture. Union Carbide has $40 million in construction under way; next month a $20 million Monsanto plant will go into operation. With all this, four major U.S. banks have branched into Antwerp in the past year...
...trying to turn France into an economic slaveling, put on restrictions deliberately aimed at discouraging U.S. investment in France. Last year only 30 U.S. firms cared to penetrate De Gaulle's wall. Because of French obstacles, General Motors put a new, 5,000-job auto-assembly plant in Antwerp instead of Alsace. Phillips Petroleum shifted a proposed polyethylene factory from Bordeaux to Belgium. Ford is about to build a new production complex a few miles across the French border in West Germany; from there it can sell into France almost as well as if it were inside the country...
...alter France's attitude between now and then-including the departure of Charles de Gaulle. In any case, plans have been made to cope with outright ouster. Already the day-to-day supply of the U.S. Seventh Army in Germany is based not on French ports but on Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg. And though it would cost at least $700 million, the U.S. could move most of its facilities in France to the Low Countries and West Germany. To the U.S., it seemed a sizable sum to charge for amour-propre. But not to De Gaulle. As an atomic...