• Baxter To Expand Its Facility At Castlebar Creating 220 New Jobs
• Cedar Group To Establish Call Centre in Castlebar Creating 150 New Jobs
• Baxter Shared Services Centre in Dublin Creating 80 New Jobs
• IDA At Advanced Stage of Negotiations For Project For Ballina
• Government Committed To Regional Development - Tánaiste

Tánaiste Mary Harney announced today (Friday 28th May, 1999) further success in delivering new job creation projects to County Mayo, with a £30 million expansion by Baxter Ireland. Baxter will create 220 new jobs at their facility in Castlebar. While at their Swinford facility, the company have invested £5 million in a special production unit to supply the Japanese market. Baxter will also establish a European Shared Services Centre in Dublin creating 80 new jobs. In a separate project, the UK based Cedar Group will establish a new financial services call centre in Castlebar creating 150 new jobs.

"These new jobs for Mayo, supported by IDA Ireland, follow on a number of significant investments in the county over the past 2 years. I am happy that there is progressive success underway in the county and that this will continue. It means that there are now over 1,000 new jobs in the process of being created in 8 IDA backed projects in the county. These are well distributed across Ballina, Castlebar and Claremorris, with Westport benefiting from the success of Allergan, which itself now employs 1,000 people in the town," said the Tánaiste.

The Tánaiste re-affirmed the very strong commitment which she herself has to continued development in the county and said that IDA Ireland was continuing it's intensive drive to bring more new overseas industries to Mayo. "Progress is being made and will continue so in the period ahead," she emphasised. "The sustained effort on regional industrial development is paying dividends throughout the country. This will continue and will be intensified as we move to get more high quality job creating projects to provincial centres," the Tánaiste stated.

In the context of further industrial development in Mayo, the Tánaiste also confirmed that IDA Ireland were at an advanced stage of negotiations in relation to an engineering plastics project for Ballina.

The Tánaiste announced that the Government had approved IDA Ireland support for the Baxter developments which would bring a total of 300 new jobs to Castlebar and Dublin. "The two manufacturing plants in Mayo will benefit from significant expansion which will consolidate and give them a bright future. The development will see 220 new jobs being created at the Castlebar facility. Baxter will also establish a Shared Services Centre in Dublin, as part of a strategic re-structuring of their European back office activities."

The Tánaiste also announced that the Cedar Group Plc of Surrey, England will establish a call centre in Castlebar with IDA support, creating 150 new jobs. This centre will support the company's marketing of technical and software services to business in the financial services sectors.

Announcing the Cedar project the Tánaiste said "this is a significant project for Castlebar and the Western region. It will offer a wide range of employment opportunities for people from school leaver level through to graduates and those experienced in areas such as finance, software, technical support and information technology. Cedar will establish strong links with the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology in the town and it expects a proportion of those recruited to be certificate, diploma and degree graduates from the Institute."

Cedar Group is a developer and provider of computer and call centre software solutions and services to business organisations. Its products include solutions in the area of Customer Relationship Management which are used by companies for call centre operations, data warehousing and quality workflow and document management.

Cedar is responsible for the establishment of the Castlebar call centre as part of a new joint venture operation - "Sword" - recently formed with several financial services organisations to sell their products to UK markets. The financial institutions will provide suitable products to "Sword" and Cedar, utilising its customer relationship marketing techniques, will provide the management, technology and call centre infrastructure necessary to market them. Castlebar will be responsible for telemarketing, call handling, client service teams and systems support.

Baxter Ireland has two facilities in Co. Mayo, at Castlebar and Swinford. At the Castlebar facility, a £24.2 million investment, supported by IDA Ireland will result the creation of 220 jobs and the upgrading of the existing operation and the installation of new state-of-the-art technology, called Clearflex.

Clearflex, which is both cost effective and responds to customer needs, is a new manufacturing process for dialysis solutions. The Castlebar plant will become the company's centre-of-excellence for renal solutions for kidney dialysis treatment, supplying the entire European market with Clearflex products.

While the new Clearflex manufacturing process will be based in Castlebar, Baxter has also invested £5 million at its Swinford plant in a purpose-built manufacturing unit to supply the Japanese market. The facility produces medical accessories for renal therapy and vein access.

The Tánaiste said, "the new European Shared Services Centre in Dublin, which will create 80 jobs, is the result of Baxter's strategic decision to restructure certain European back office activities such as finance, information technology, logistics, purchasing and supply chain management functions to enable it to respond with flexibility to changing business needs. "

Eric Beard, Chairman, European Board of Baxter, thanked the Tánaiste for her support and expressed the company's gratitude to their staff. "This is a great occasion for Baxter. We have been operating in Ireland for 27 years now and our expansion announcement today is good news for Baxter in Ireland and for our company internationally. We appreciate the commitment shown to us by our Irish employees and this news indicates our continued growth and investment here in Ireland," he said.

"I also want to take this opportunity to commend the Government on the work done on infrastructure development. At Baxter we greatly welcome this and we hope to see further investment in these areas which will enable us to distribute and export our products more competitively," he added.

The Tánaiste also congratulated the management and workforce at Baxter Ireland and said it was their immense effort that had won this investment. "Their commitment to improving productivity has resulted in the Castlebar operation winning this investment which will further integrate it into Baxter's global supply chain."