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PARIS, Dec 11 (Reuters) - French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroen pledged to invest in production of new models at its Poissy factory west of Paris, unions said on Thursday, safeguarding the plant's future in return for cutbacks agreed with workers' representatives.
Paris-based Peugeot briefed unions on plans to spend 150 million euros ($187 million) upgrading Poissy as part of an earlier 1.5 billion euro investment pledge to increase French production in return for job cuts and productivity gains.
Peugeot emerged from a prolonged European auto-market slump in need of a 3 billion euro bailout, which saw the French state and China's Dongfeng each take 14 percent stakes earlier this year.
Under a 2013 labour deal with unions, the company is scrapping assembly lines to shrink plants in Mulhouse, eastern France and Poissy, west of the French capital.
The Poissy site, which employs 5,440 workers to build the Citroen C3, Peugeot 208 and upscale DS3 subcompacts, will be reduced to a single line early next year as the company concentrates assembly of the C3 in Slovakia.
The first of the new models for Poissy, a compact premium vehicle to be announced early next year, will go into production in 2018, said Jean-Francois Kondratiuk, an FO union official who sits on the Peugeot board.
That commitment effectively guarantees that the plant's continued activity "at least until 2025", he said.
($1 = 0.8033 euros) (Reporting by Gilles Guillaume, Writing by Laurence Frost; Editing by Mark Potter)