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Ireland Remains the Location of Choice for US Investment

March 15, 2012

Market leaders in the pharmaceutical, technology, and financial services sectors continue to demonstrate confidence by further investing in Ireland:

PayPal, the online payments company, is to establish a new European Operations Centre in Dundalk, Co. Louth, creating 1,000 jobs. The centre will open in July 2012 and will handle customer service, financial operations and merchant services and sales for the EMEA region.

Abbott is to invest US$112 million (€85 million) in expanding its Sligo manufacturing plant. The expansion will see the creation of 175 highly skilled jobs and provide additional capacity to support Abbott’s future pipeline in the areas of virology, oncology and nephrology.

Allergan has announced a US$350 million expansion of its development and manufacturing operations at its Westport plant. The expansion will see the creation of 200 new jobs over 4 years.

Cook Medical, the medical device company and Irish Medical Technology Company of the Year 2011, is to invest €16.5 million in R&D at its Limerick facility. The investment will be concentrated on the development of a state of the art research and development lab and the establishment of Cook Ireland as the key site for R&D for the Zilver product line of peripheral intervention devices.

Eli Lilly has announced plans to develop a new 240,000 sq ft manufacturing facility at its Kinsale, Co. Cork campus. The company plans to invest €330 million in developing the new biopharmaceutical commercialisation and manufacturing plant which will employ 200 highly skilled employees once operational.

Big Fish Games, the online games provider headquartered in Seattle, is to develop a cloud gaming R&D facility at its Cork base. 30 highly skilled software engineering jobs will be created as a result of the expansion.

Datalogic ADC, a division of the Datalogic Group, has announced its plans to establish an EMEA HQ in Dublin. The operation will include a shared services and customer management centre and is initially expected to create circa 30 jobs.

HP has announced that it is to create 150 high-end R&D jobs across its Irish operations to work on numerous projects including the building and development of cloud based infrastructures. It is expected that up to 130 ancillary technical and support roles will also be created.

Microsoft is to invest US$130 million in the expansion of its Dublin based data centre. The expansion will support the growth in demand for cloud services. Microsoft has already invested US$500 million in the site which services customers across the EMEA region.

Workday, the US “software as a service” provider, has announced plans to create 100 jobs in Dublin as part of an EMEA expansion plan which aims to take advantage of the growth of cloud computing in Europe.

MasterCard Worldwide will headquarter its global technology operations in Dublin. The company announced that it is to employ an additional 130 staff over the next 4 years increasing its Irish workforce to 200.