'It is a moveable feast ... it will be the most dazzling industrial complex." With those words, Dr John Bridge heralded the arrival of Samsung, the Korean company with grand plans to transform Wynyard into an "electronic city" that would create 3,200 jobs.

Dr Bridge, then head of the Northern Development Company, saw the "moveable feast" as an additional 1,800 jobs created indirectly, adding up to one of the biggest coups for a development company the UK had yet seen.

Samsung was one of a number of Far Eastern companies lured to the region by an eager workforce and the promise of Government money.

It cost the Department of Trade and Industry £58m in aid and Cleveland County Council and regeneration agency English Partnerships £20m to bring Samsung to Teesside.

Firms such as Nissan, Fujitsu, Sanyo and Siemens also arrived at the table as part of the so-called sunrise revolution of Far Eastern industry.

But a decade on, and the dream is in tatters, the moveable feast has been picked over, and only Nissan remains - and recent comments from chief executive Carlos Ghosn suggest it is hungry for more state aid.

Samsung, which opened its headquarters at Wynyard, Billingham, between Stockton and Hartlepool, in 1995, is an illustration of how hopes have been dashed.

The Korean company, then the 14th largest in the world, was feted when it chose to come to Teesside in 1994. A year later, it opened its doors at the 400-acre electronics village at Wynyard with promises to spend up to £600m creating 3,200 jobs. That investment figure was soon revised downwards to £450m, but still, it was further proof the region had emerged from the post-1980s gloom of the seemingly endless decline in mining and shipbuilding.

The role of the great and good in the region was recognised internationally when the magazine Site Selection named the Northern Development Company as the UK's most effective job-creation organisation in Britain and one of the world's top ten.

And yet, it took only a few short years for the sun to set on the "new Industrial Revolution", as it was described by politicians, including former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine, who said the jobs were "tomorrow's industries, bringing high skills and exciting potential".

Siemens, of Tyneside, and Fujitsu, of Newton Aycliffe, received £35m in taxpayers money between them, but were gone by 1998, shedding hundreds of jobs.

While over at Samsung, there were already problems. Only four years after promising 3,200 jobs, bosses revealed those plans had been "put on hold". It seemed that, like the other factories, there were problems in the so-called tiger economies of the Far East, and far-flung projects overseas in Britain had to be reined back.

Still, a number of jobs had already been created. But they soon began to disappear as well. A high point seems to be have been 1997, when 1,400 people were employed at Samsung. By 2000, The Northern Echo reported that the company employed 850 men and women, and only 420 were employed at the Wynyard plant until today. The firm hung on and continued to make computer monitors and microwave ovens when Sanyo, at Newton Aycliffe, went the way of Fujitsu and Siemens in 2001.

The future is uncertain for Samsung's workforce, and yet David Walsh, who welcomed Samsung to the region as chairman of the Cleveland County Council Development Committee, said he would do the same again.

"You have to go for inward investment - you have to do everything to attract jobs," he said. "Our workers are just too good not to win out in the end."