Re: French data
A few details if I may ...
Originally posted by KillerWhale
Hi,
{snip}
What kind of cars are sold where you live and who makes them?
The major French brands are Peugeot, Renault, Citroen. The sell family cars as well as equipment (for Renault). We also have foreign cars, be they Fiat, Honda, Daewoo, Mercedes, BMW, Rover... The exception is american cars, we have almost none.
Do you know who owns that company?
No idea.
Peugeot and Citroen are in fact the same company: PSA. As a matter of fact, they use the same platform quite often. Peugeot cars are usually built more like sport cars, but the basis is often the same.
As for Renault, AFAIR, it is only partly owned by the French state ... and it in turn owns Nissan (or a big part of it) since ... not sure, a few years I believe, which makes it a much bigger company than meets the eye.
How about trucks, heavy equipment, motorcycles, ocean-going ships, trains, airplanes, or helicotpers?
Renault manufactures trucks and equipment. For motorcycles, it's the same, we have lots of foreign brands - almost no French brands. Planes are manufactured by Dassault (military) and Airbus (civilian), as well as by foreign companies (McDonnell Douglas especially).
Airbus is actually "Airbus Industry" AFAIR owned by EADS ... it's a British-French-German-Italian(or is it Spanish?) aeronautics consortium I think. From what I've heard/seen, Airbus planes have been progressively replacing older planes like DC10 or Boeing749 in Air France's fleet.
EADS also makes the Eurofighter ... competitor to the Rafale from Dassault ... apparently, the Eurofighter is not nearly as good as the Rafale, but not as expensive either 
.
Trains are owned by the state, and they are designed by a variety of companies (I've seen Siemens - which is German, BTW). Helicopters? No clue.
Most of the trains are indeed owned by SNCF, which is indeed a state company. However, a big part of those trains are made by Alsthom I believe. The 6 or 7 versions of TGVs, the new regional trains, and part of the subways. Alsthom is ... errr ... French or Swiss ... some French speaking country I think anyway .
Helicopters are made by Eurocopter, which now belongs to EADS too AFAIR. They make civilian as well as military helicopters, among which the Tiger attack helicopter (one of the few helicopters that can make a real ... damn, how do you call that ... those acrobatic figures where the aircraft ends up upside down ... no idea how that'd help a helicopter fighter pilot though ... it does most of the things the Apache does too ).
What TV channels/networks can you watch? Do you know who owns them or which other channels are owned by the same company?
{snip ... KW pretty much said it all}
What are the major corporations in your country? What do they do?
The biggest is Vivendi-Universal, which does about everything.
Including getting busted for trying to manipulate its data for the stock exchange or something .
There are also some really big corporations in the food sector ... things like Danone, Nestle, etc.
The telecom business sprouted it's share of corporations (France Telecom - Orange (state), SFR (Vivendi, right?), and Bouygues (t's a small world isn't it?)), but some are bound to go down sooner or later with the IT crisis ... I suppose there can be only one ... or two .
Every procedure for getting a cat to take a pill works fine -- once.
Like the Borg, they learn...
-- (Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)
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