in 1995 tesco entered the Hungarian market by acquiring the S-Market chain. In 1998 it ventured further to find a local partner in Thailand and established Tesco-Lotus. An innovative partnership in 1999 with Samsung in South Korea formed HomePlus, thereby creating the bedrock for a sustained Asian presence-despite a disastrous 11 billion failure in Taiwan when Tesco sought to sell all of its Taiwan sites but had to settle on swapping them for stores owned by Carrefour (a major competitor from France) in the Czech Republic and Slovakia