They came to the UK promising to create thousands of new jobs making entertainment systems but within months of opening a state-of-the-art factory the business was in trouble and 1000 newly recruited employees were about to be dumped on the scrapheap.

The trouble for the electronics giant was that they had miscalculated global demand for their product - in simple terms their market did not exist. They now had a workforce and a UK factory they no longer wanted.

We were brought in to handle communications on behalf of the company and the local development agency.

The electronics giant was totally unfamiliar with the UK and they knew nothing about redundancy procedures. Our first action was to draft in an HR expert who implemented the redundancy programme.

We handled internal and external communications coping with intense media and political attention while minimising damage to the corporation's brand.

We then embarked on a global promotional campaign to find new occupiers for the site turning a disaster into a recovery situation.