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| Motorola's Software Development Centre at Mahon Industrial Estate, Blackrock, Cork Photo Credit: Adrian Duffy |
The US mobile phone company Motorola has confirmed that it is to shut its software centre in Cork with the loss of more than 300 jobs.
The facility in the Mahon Industrial Estate near Blackrock in Cork City, will be closed by the end of May, and 330 of the 350 staff employed there will leave the company.
Workers at the plant will be informed on Friday.
The world's No. 2 mobile phone company Motorola, said last January 29th that it was considering closing its facility and we viewed it as a certainty.
On Friday, January 19, Finfacts reported that the Cork facility was at risk, in the wake of Motorola CEO Ed Zander's announcement that the company would cut 3,500 jobs as it seeks to slash operating costs after a plunge in margins.
In contrast with market leader Nokia, Motorola gained sales at the expense of a big drop in margins.
The Motorola Cork facility is a Software Development Centre and it employs many of the type of workers that local TD, Micheál Martin T.D., Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, refers to as "high calibre jobs" or "high value jobs.
It has been a bad week for such high-end jobs this week with other announcements in Munster that 560 jobs are to be lost at Proctor and Gamble in Nenagh, Thomson Scientific in Limerick and Bourns Electronics in Cork.
The message from the recent closures is that public sector jobs are the only safe ones in the economy and little investment has gone into development of the indigenous sector.
An estimated €40 billion has been invested in commercial property in both Ireland and overseas since 2001 - Last year, Bank of Ireland Private Banking put the total at €30 billion in the period 2001-2005. Irish Venture Capital investment in 2006 was €192m - equivalent to 0.024% of 2006 investment in overseas commercial property.
