Barry O’Leary, CEO of IDA Ireland, opened up the proceedings for the IEF 2013 here in Dublin. Corporation tax is only 12 percent here, and there’s only four million or so people live in the Emerald Isle.
How does the Irish Development Agency do it? The US accounts for three quarters of our investment and the value is $200 million. The IDA has six locations in the USA, and three in Europe with offices in India, Brazil and China.
The companies spend about 19 billion Euro and IDA is active in nine sectors, but four are the most important including ICT such as Intel, HP and the rest. The next category is pharmas and related companies. The third area is the international finance area and an area of huge growth is social media, digital content with Google, Amazon, Twitter and the like.
Google has 2,800 people in Ireland and Ebay and Paypal between them have over 2,000 people. The IDA strategy is to get a high market share and the areas it targets include manufacturing and R&D. Because of the high number of multinationals it’s very important that we keep these big brand names.
IBM built a big campus for manufacturing but doesn’t manufacture any more and focuses on software. When Intel came in the late 1980s and has invested well in excess of seven billion.
Apple has 4,000 people here but now it’s the operation hub for Europe rather than manufacturing as it used to do down in Cork.
Newer companies here in Ireland include Huawei, Trip Advisor and Twitter.
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Ireland beats the Europack at inward investment
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