Eli Lilly named Cork Chamber Company of the Year
Collecting the award are Mike Smith, General Manager at Eli Lilly & Co. GBS Centres in Cork, Kuala Lumpur & Mexico City and Todd Winge, Vice President & General Manager at Eli Lilly & Co. Kinsale with Elaine Collins, Key Account Director, Vodafone Ireland, Paula Cogan, Cork Chamber President and Conor Healy, CEO, Cork Chamber.
Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has been named the Cork Chamber Company of the Year.
The company’s five decades in Cork and their contribution to the economy were recognised by the region’s business community. The pharma company has a significant manufacturing facility in Kinsale and its Global Business Solutions (GBS) centre in Little Island.
The Chamber Awards ceremony is a key business event each year and this year moved online due to the impact of Covid-19.
At the event the four individual category winners were also announced.
- Emerging Company of the Year: AI firm Altada
- SME Company of the Year: Granite web services
- Large Company of the Year: web scraping tech firm Zyte
- International Company of the Year: Eli Lilly
2021 marks the 23rd year of the Cork Company of the Year Awards which recognise the success, innovation and ingenuity of businesses operating in Cork.
“There is no shortage of vision and ambition in Cork and our winners today show exemplary ability to innovate and evolve to meet the changing demands of our modern world,” Paula Cogan, President of Cork Chamber said.
“There was a remarkably high standard among our finalists in each category and that is testament to the outstanding business culture in our region and its importance for our local and national economy.” Accepting the overall award, Michael Smith, General Manager at Eli Lilly and Company GBS Centres in Cork, Kuala Lumpur & Mexico City said the award recognises the efforts of so many people over the years to make Lilly Kinsale and Cork what they are today.
We have a quote in Lilly that we hold very dear, it says ‘take what you find here and make it better and better’ It’s a piece of wisdom that our founder, Colonel Eli Lilly passed onto his son J.K. Lilly as he joined the company over 100 years ago.”
The Cork Chamber Cork Company of the Year Awards are held in association with Vodafone Ireland and Media Partner Irish Examiner.
Since arriving in Kinsale in 1978, global biopharmaceutical company Eli Lilly has put down deep roots in Cork.
Its belief in the region was reinforced in 2010 when it picked Little Island as the location as the main office for its new Global Business Solutions (GBS). Recent growth has resulted in a fivefold increase in employment with worker numbers at both facilities at just under 2,000. Eli Lilly manufactures life-saving products and medicines for the treatment of cancer, immunology diseases, diabetes, and pain. Additionally, over the past year, they have put a focus on the race to treat Covid-19.
The Lilly operations in Cork have had a significant impact on the county over four decades, offering high quality, skilled jobs along with major capital investments in the region. Approximately €1.5bn has been invested in projects at the Kinsale site in the past 10 years.
The GBS in Little Island is the largest global services site at Lilly, coordinating clinical trials and providing support to patients and healthcare professionals, as well as traditional global services provision. Its growth has also seen new employees moving to live and work in the county from across the EU and the world. There are almost 30 nationalities represented in this group, adding wonderful richness to the diverse fabric of modern Cork.
The past decade, in particular, has seen enormous growth and expansion across both Cork sites with the associated off-spin of economic benefits to the region. This has been made possible due to the talent and commitment of the people on both sites. Lilly’s success is built on its teams’ ability to continuously innovate, exemplified by the role they played in the delivery of Covid treatments in 2020, from clinical development through to regulatory, manufacturing, supply chain and patient care.
Like many companies, Eli Lilly has a firm focus on sustainability. They are building a solar farm on the Kinsale site, in partnership with Waterford-based company, EnerPower. At peak output in mid-2021, it will replace 65% of the Kinsale site’s purchased electricity. Kinsale also has a recycling rate of 99.6% for defined recyclable waste with just 0.45% of site waste sent to landfill
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