BBC News LinkMore than 900 workers losing their jobs at a County Londonderry computer company are to receive details of the redundancy terms being offered to them. Staff at Seagate in Limavady were told on Monday they were losing their jobs. Seagate, which has received £12m from Invest Northern Ireland and its predecessor IDB since 2001, will close in the second half of next year.
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However, it has a plant in Malaysia which is due to start operations in the new year.
It will make the computer components currently being made in Limavady.
Ouch.
The hard drive manufacture market is going to take more of a beating in the future as more and more devices move to solid state memory. Seagate don’t really have a rep for reliability anyway but reduced margins and reduced costs are not going to improve that.
End of the day, that’s probably 900 Christmases ruined. I love it when companies wait til this time of the year to dump their staff. Scrooge ain’t in it. Nortel was an expert at it (note: it’s now 5 years since I left Nortel) with multiple years of “Christmas is coming, better go down the job market”. Bless them.
This, alongside the Nortel/Flextronics fallout, is going to flood the Northern Ireland marketplace with ex-technology workers. I think, however, the market will have to realise that these things come in cycles. Technology firms like Seagate will come in, stay for a decade and realise good savings from Northern Irelands low-cost economy (and a £12 000 000 sweetener ain’t bad) and then will move off again to a lower cost economy. This means, in the grand scheme of things, that Northern Ireland is just a middle man, a safe harbour for US companies to attempt their offshoring. Once they’re confident with it, they can go further afield.
Is Northern Ireland doomed to an ephemeral manufacturing economy? Yes, I think so.
Are there other areas where Northern Ireland could excel? Possibly.
We’ve already seen how popular Northern Ireland is as a call centre location: all of the call centres in the province are growing, especially as companies attempt to bring them back from their first rounds of offshoring. The Irish just seem to be cheap good at it.
InvestNI should be focussing on the Seagate fallout and acting as a dating service. There are going to be a lot of potential startup companies coming out of Limavady in the near future with specific (and potentially high margin) expertise in data storage and retention.
There’s a frighteningly large number of empty and derelict warehouse and manufacturing premises in Northern Ireland that could really do with being repurposed. All of them “InvestNI properties”. Empty they’re a drain, filled, even with only a small number of tenant companies, they’re a boon.