THREE hundred jobs are to be created in a new expansion at the Derry plant of the American owned computer company Seagate Technology, the world's biggest producer of hard disks. The jobs stem from a £50 million investment announced yesterday by IDB chairman Mr John McGuckian, and will bring the numbers employed at Seagate to around 1,100 by the end of 1998.
Seagate vice president Mr Brendan Hegarty has said that the company is considering plans for a second manufacturing plant in the city, with the potential for between 500 and 1,000 jobs. He said that Derry was a strong contender for any new development because of the highly favourable impression made by the existing plant. A final decision is expected later this year.
The company went into production on the Springtown Industrial Estate in January 1994. Total investment at the plant currently stands at around £175 million.
"We had originally envisaged a project which might be employing 500 people by the end of 1998," he said. "But the plant has surpassed its promise every step of the way." Mr McGuckian described the project as "a stunning success story".
Seagate makes a key component for more than a quarter of the 12 million disk drives sold by its American parent company every year. The latest investment follows a £60 million expansion last May which produced 300 jobs. It also enabled the Derry plant to make a more advanced version of its product, the read write head which reads and changes the information stored on the disk.
The plant supplies the heads, mounted on wafers, to another Seagate operation in Penang, from where they are sent on to Singapore for the final disk drive assembly.
The managing director of the Derry plant, Mr Michael Caulfield, said that over two million heads a week are currently being sent to Penang, but that this would increase to four million when the Derry factory reaches full production sometime in 1997.
Seagate, which is based in California, is the world's largest independent producer of computer disk drives, selling more than 12 million a year to computer manufacturers like Apple and Compaq. It has an annual turnover of more than $4 billion, making it one of the top 500 US companies.
The Derry factory is not the company's only operation in Ireland. A drive assembly plant is located at the old Digital factory in Clonmel. It is supplied with read write heads from Derry, although they arrive via Penang, where an intermediate stage in the manufacturing process is carried out. Mr Caulfield said that once the Clonmel factory is in full production, it could increase demand from the Derry plant by up to 25 per cent.
Seagate built its Derry plant following a chance meeting between the city's MP, SDLP leader Mr John Hume, and Dr Hegarty, a second generation Irishman who is Seagate's executive vice president. The meeting took place in the Duke of Wellington Bar near California's Silicon Valley five years ago.
"It was probably the most important drink I've ever had", said Mr Hume.
