Seagate to announce 1,000 jobs for Cork

US computer company Seagate will today announce its second major investment in Ireland in less than a week, confirming that it is to establish a 1,000 job facility in Ringaskiddy in a £150 million investment.

Just last Friday, Seagate announced that it was building a second factory in Derry, which will create another 1,000 jobs, in addition to the 1,125 employed in its existing plant there.

The new Ringaskiddy factory, which will be backed by IDA Ireland, will be its fifth location in Ireland, as it also operates in Limavady in Northern Ireland and Clonmel, Co Tipperary, employing a total of 4,500 people North and South.

The Seagate board has approved the new investment and it is expected to be sanctioned by the Cabinet this morning, before the official announcement in Ringaskiddy this afternoon by the Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Mr Bruton.

The investment has been won by IDA Ireland against tough competition from other locations, particularly Scotland. Seagate is to build a new 200,000 sq ft state of the art facility. The high level of investment is because of the cost of the clean room and advanced electronic technology in the new plant.

Seagate manufactures disk drives for computer systems and the new plant will be involved in producing the actual discs at the heart of the system.

The plant is expected to take around a year to complete, with manufacturing scheduled to start in summer 1998. Seagate expects to have 1,000 people employed in Cork within three years. The investment will be the first major electronics facility in Ringaskiddy, with the vast bulk of the existing plants there in the pharmaceutical sector.

Seagate is the world's leading producer of disc drives and employs 108,000 people in 22 plants worldwide. Last March it merged with another US company, disc drive manufacturer Conor Peripherals, making Seagate one of the biggest manufacturers of computer hardware in the world. Its most recent results - covering a nine month period show net profit of around £400 million on turnover of £4.4 billion.

Seagate opened its first Irish plant in Derry in 1994, having originally intended to establish in Clonshaugh in North Dublin.

The next year it announced the first of four expansions of the Derry plant and its £25 million investment in the old Digital plant in Clonmel, which was officially opened last week. Last September the company announced that it was taking over a plant in Limavady, Co Derry, and then came last week's announcement of the second plant in Derry. The Irish plants are all involved in different aspects of the disk drive manufacturing process.

The Clonmel plant produces the hard discs, while the Derry plant producers the film heads for the disc drives. The Limavady plant manufactures aluminium disk substrates for the hard disk drives. The new Ringaskiddy plant will be involved in adding the coating which puts the memory storage on the discs, a particularly high technology process requiring substantial investment in ongoing research and development.