Some 13,000 new jobs were created across a record 148 investments won in 2011, the IDA said in its end-of-year statement today. The number of new companies investing in Ireland for the first time, including Twitter and Zynga, is up 30pc.
“Export-led growth, particularly in services, is adding to the employment portfolio of IDA’s clients, which created over 13,000 new jobs in 2011. This represents a 20pc increase on last year,” said IDA Ireland CEO Barry O’Leary.
“Job losses were at their lowest in over a decade, leading to the best net jobs increase in over 10 years. The ICT, life sciences, financial services, business services and digital media sectors made up for the majority of the new jobs.”
The number of jobs created in 2011 is up 20pc on the previous year’s level of 10,897 jobs created, the State agency revealed.
The total number of people employed by IDA client companies is now standing at 146,000.
IDA client companies now contribute to more than 70pc of Ireland’s exports and during 2011 delivered an export performance of €115bn.
The year 2011 was characterised by major investments from Twitter, Intel, IBM, Coca-Cola, Amgen, Pfizer, MSD, PayPal, Fidelity, HedgeServe, VMware, EA/Bioware, Prometric, Sumitomo (JRI America), Harmac, Analog Devices and Gilt Groupe.
More than 70pc of corporation tax in Ireland is paid by multinational companies.
During 2011, these companies spent €19bn in the local economy and paid €6.9bn in payroll.
Some €700m worth of new R&D investment was generated in 2011 and two-thirds of all business-spend on R&D in the Irish economy was by IDA client companies.
Action Plan for Jobs
Ireland’s Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Richard Bruton, TD, welcomed these results.
“These results represent a very significant achievement at a very difficult time in the employment market. Not only has the number of new jobs increased substantially, but just as importantly, the number of jobs lost has decreased, leaving a very healthy net employment increase of (6000/6114) in Government-supported multinationals in 2011.
“If we are to create the numbers of new jobs we need in order to address the massive employment challenges we face, we must build aggressively on the major strengths we have in the foreign multinational sector.
“Through this month’s Action Plan for Jobs, I will be using these strengths both to support our indigenous companies and to attract ever more dynamic multinational operations to Ireland. In this way, we can ensure that we build on 2011’s major achievements and address the jobs crisis in a real way,” Bruton said.
