A BELFAST IT firm has taken its latest step in Brexit-proofing the business by opening a new office in the Republic.
Belfast-headquartered Neueda Technologies announced yesterday it is to open a software engineering hub in Athlone, Co Westmeath and take on 200 staff over the next four years.
More than 70 members of staff have already been hired with that number expected to grow to over 80 by the end of the year. The new roles are almost exclusively for technology specialists including experienced software developers, cloud engineers and agile practitioners.
Speaking about the investment, which is supported by the IDA, David Bole, founder and owner of Neueda Technologies, said:
“After considering several international locations for our new engineering hub, we opted for Athlone in January 2018 and I can say that we wish we had set up here years ago. With one-third of our current positions already filled, we continue to be impressed with the level of technical and engineering talent available to us in the Midlands, particularly considering our very high hiring-bar."
The new Irish office comes after the company, which specialises in IT Training, development and consulting services, set up in Spain in October. Neueda, which is headquartered at Weavers Court in Belfast also has offices in London and Dublin.
Speaking to The Irish News in December chief executive of Neueda, Brendan Monaghan said the Spanish office was set up as a Brexit fail-safe. He said the company was wary of the implications of a possible hard Brexit.
"Having a cost base in the currency is the main thing. It's removing the foreign exchange fluctuations, it's removing Visa issues, it's removing travel issues. As a company we have people on flights and trains and cars every day of the week. We have 30 per cent of our business in Dublin and we have guys living on the border that wake up in the morning and decide to turn left or right. So any sort of interruption to that flow changes economics, introduces uncertainties and delays and we would have to adapt to it," he said.
"So the issue for businesses like ourselves is we can't wait for the politicians to decide what this thing looks like. There's so much uncertainty, the only thing we can do is be proactive and try to second-guess what this thing is going to look like," Mr Monaghan added.
Neueda employs in excess of 220 people at its Belfast base and last year announced £12m plans to add 165 jobs to the workforce by the end of next year.
