IDA-supported investments to create 150 new jobs

The Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Mary Harney has announced that three new IDA Ireland-supported investments will create almost 150 new jobs over the next five years.

Two of the investments are expansions by existing companies in Kerry and one is a new operation in Waterford.

Killarney-based Dollinger is to be expanded and established as the global centre for production of its compressed air products by its US parent, the Fortune 500 company, SPX Air Treatment.

The €1.1m investment will create more than 70 jobs over the next four years and will see Dollinger relocating to larger premises in Killarney.

Also Killarney-based is Liebherr Container Cranes, which plans to recruit six highly-skilled R&D personnel for a new R&D specialised team. The company was established in Killarney in 1958 and is one of longest established IDA-supported companies in Ireland.

Liebherr currently employs over 400 people at its Killarney facility, with 30 people in R&D. Parent company Liebherr International AG is headquarted in Switzerland and employs 21,000 people worldwide.

The final investment is Paris-based Ubiquis SA, which is to establish a centre for report writing to produce high-value reports of spoken events such as conferences, seminars and meeting for US and UK clients.

The company will create 69 jobs over five years and it chose Waterford because of the quality of graduates available.

Mr Guillaume Dumortier of Ubiqus said: "We see a good fit between the skills requirement of this centre and the graduates of the Waterford Institute of Technology ,as well as graduates of other Irish colleges who reside in the South East."

He echoed Harney's belief that "the right location is not all about cost, but is more about ensuring the success of the project", when he said: "We studied other English-speaking locations across the world and, while they offered lower costs than Ireland, we chose Ireland because of the higher level of written and literary skills we found there."

Ubiqus, which is a private company employing 170 people, has already started a recruitment drive for its new Waterford operation.