In a recent study Claud Beaud has shown how the French armaments company, Schneider, acting with the Banque de l'Union Parisienne in the Union Européenne Industrielle et Financière (UEIF) which they formed jointly in 1920, made large industrial investments in the ruins of the Habsburg empire, their acquisitions including the Škoda Works and Bergund Hütten werksgesellschaft in Czechoslovakia, Veitscher Magnesit Werke of Austria, the Huta Bankowa group in Poland, and the Hungarian General Credit Bank. Beaud characterised Eugene Schneider's new strategy in Central Europe as an extension of his previous Russian initiatives, rather than as comparable to his other major multinational enterprises after 1898 in Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Morocco and South America. As Schneider ‘had staked technology rather than capital’ in the Putilov arsenal project before 1914, he was not chastened by its failure, and believing ‘the Bolshevik régime to be on the verge of collapse’, envisaged Škoda as ‘the arsenal of the Little Entente, replacing or even complementing Putilov’. Beaud suggests that development of his company's East European markets was a ‘secondary’ strategic motive for Eugene Schneider (1868–1942), who ‘desired to play a part, in some way, in increasing France's greatness… [during] the time of the “Bloc national” when the superior interests of the nation overrode the short term economic goals of a firm’.