JANUARY
American card processing company TSYS, formerly known as Cayan, said it was cutting 120 jobs in Belfast and Derry and moving the roles to the US and the Philippines. It said the plan to cease contact services in Northern Ireland followed a worldwide review of the business after it merged with US giant Global Payments Inc in 2020.
Specialist joinery manufacturer Woodmarque, near Dungannon, which has built a reputation across Ireland and the UK for manufacturing fire doors, announced plans to create 150 jobs in an £8 million expansion of the business. It said the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which claimed 72 lives in London in 2017, had resulted in a series of significant refurbishment schemes which has created a surge in demand for its fire safety products.
Farmweek, the north's only weekly newspaper devoted entirely to news, views and featured articles connected to the farming scene, celebrated its 60th birthday. Since its first issue hit the streets on January 3 1961, the paper has consistently and unerringly charted the massive progress and change across the north's rural scene, reporting all aspects of the farming revolution and changing methods of production.
Strength and conditioning equipment maker Blk Box said it is relocating from its headquarters at Belfast's Titanic Quarter and expanding to a new 140,000 sq ft manufacturing and distribution centre in Newtownabbey in a £1 million investment. It came just two months after it announced 16 additional jobs and a £2 million investment in laser cutting equipment and a state-of-the-art paint line.
Massachusetts-based EverQuote Inc, which operates an online insurance marketplace primarily for the American market, revealed that it was planning to build a software development centre in Northern Ireland, employing up to 70 people over the next two years. The jobs, paying average salaries of more than £50,000, will eventually deliver £3.7 million in wages.
Banbridge-headquartered family-owned seeds and grain firm Germinal Holdings, founded in 1825, is uprooting its business and relocating to Co Tipperary. It will transfer its head office function to Belfast, while its new operational base will be in Thurles, where Germinal has invested heavily in a production and distribution facility in recent years. There will be a small number of redundancies in its Banbridge administrative team when the changes are implemented.
Data from growth platform Tech Nation and job search engine Adzuna showed that companies in Northern Ireland had their best-ever year in 2020, raising a record £45.6 million in venture capital investment and easily eclipsing the previous record year for VC in 2018, when start-ups raised £30.4m. It also said there were currently 806 open IT-related roles in the north - way ahead of healthcare/nursing (521 vacancies) and accounting/finance (457 openings).
JP Scally, head of Lidl in Ireland, said the retailer's supply lines from mainland Europe into the north now bypass Britain. He said the company had responded to Brexit by re-routing around the UK land-bridge where possible. He said: “We do still have goods coming in from Britain to both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland through the normal routes. But anything coming from Europe, we have re-routed around Britain to avoid the land-bridge. So the majority of that will be coming in from France.”
