The Daewoo story began with General Motors. In 1972, GM established a joint venture with Korean car maker Shinjin Motor Co., the company named GM Korea and is obviously GM's weapon to dominate the South Korean market. Although 50% stakes were sold to local industrial giant Daewoo Group in 1978, GM still controlled the development of cars.
In fact, Daewoo did not really involve much the new car development because GM could always find some outdated cars from its Opel etc. operation to transfer to Daewoo. The Pontiac Lemans of the late 80's was one of the examples. In the light of supplying the US market to fight against the Japanese small cars, Daewoo started to produce this rebadged version of Opel Kaddet on behalf of GM. However, the project gave the Korean car maker the first taste of large volume export which became the sales policy today. It also gave Daewoo a modernised plant with 170,000 annual capacity.

GM quit in 1992 as it sold the remaining stakes to Daewoo group. As the US influence evacuated, Daewoo started to develop its own cars. That called for setting up R&D centers in Europe and subcontractting many development projects to overseas consultants. With the help from the Western experts, the small car Lanos was born in 1995.

Next year, Daewoo invested into Poland's FSO, forming a joint venture which eventually produces the Matiz mini car. In 1998, SUV maker Ssangyong bankrupted and was received by Daewoo.

Daewoo group used to have variety of business in different fields. In 1999, the group got into financial crisis due to the over-expansion during the previous few years, thus resulted in selling nearly all business but the car division. The latter also faced the same fate next year. Ssangyong spinned off from the troubled Daewoo in year 2000.

In 2002, GM bought the majority assets of Daewoo and renamed it to GM Daewoo. Because the Daewoo brand had very poor image, its cars are rebadged as Chevrolet for the American and European market, and sold as Holden in Australia. GM's partial subsidiary Suzuki also took 14.9% of Daewoo to let it sell Daewoo's cars as Suzuki in the North America.