Baccarat () is a French luxury brand and manufacturer of fine crystal located in Baccarat, Meurthe-et-Moselle, France. The company owns two museums: the Musée Baccarat in Baccarat, and the Musée Baccarat in Paris on the Place des États-Unis. Groupe du Louvre was the majority shareholder of the company until 2005. The company was then acquired by Starwood Capital Group, which used the name for a luxury hotel called Baccarat Hotel New York, featuring the company's chandeliers, decorative pieces and glasses. In 2018, Fortune Fountain Capital, a Beijing-based financial group, acquired an 88.8 per cent stake of the company from Starwood Capital Group and L Catterton. On 23 December 2020, four financing funds based in Hong Kong - Tor, Sammasan, Dolphin and Corbin - took control of the capital of Fortune Fountain Limited (FFL), the holding company that held 97% of the shares of Baccarat. History 1764-1816 After the closure of the Rozières saltworks in 1760 due to a drop in the salt-content of the water, there became available a large quantity of wood floating down to the town of Baccarat. One of the main owners of the Vosges forest where this driftwood came from, namely Monseigneur de Montmorency-Laval, bishop of Metz, wanted to find another use for it and set a lucrative fire pit in Baccarat which became a glassworks. To justify the creation of this enterprise in a request made to the king in 1764 by the owner of the site, Monseigneur de Montmorency-Laval wrote: "Sire, France lacks artistic glassware, which is why the products from Bohemia enter in such great quantity: from which follows an astonishing export of deniers, at a time when the kingdom would need them so badly”. In 1764, King Louis XV of France gave permission to found a glassworks in the town of Baccarat in the Lorraine region in eastern France to Prince Bishop Cardinal Louis-Joseph de Laval-Montmorency (1710-1802). Production consisted of window panes, mirrors and stemware until 1816 when the first crystal oven went into operation. By that time over 3000 workers were employed at the site. 1823-1870 Although the name of the factory was still "Verrerie" (glassworks), in actual fact it was already specialising in crystal. The technique, however, was not that used for Bohemian Crystal, very well known in Europe and originating in Bohemia, but rather the singular rediscovery of the so-called English technique, worked in an original way at the