What comes after PayPal ?

[Pat Gill]

Yesterday we had PayPal announce a thousand jobs over 4 years and the thread on P.ie had over 10,000 page views in a day, along with much debate and liberally sprinkled with the usual political hackery.

So whats next in the pipeline ?

We might get a clue from an article in yesterdays San Francisco Chronicle

Its a reasonably long article on Ireland, cost competiveness and US FDI and worth a read in its entirety, here's a flavour.

"Dublin is a much more cost-competitive destination than it may have been before," said Robert O'Shea, a partner at legal firm Matheson Ormsby Prentice who advises U.S. companies on moving to Ireland. "That is reflected in the pipeline of projects we would see for 2012 and 2013."

Facebook is seeking to more than double the size of its European headquarters in Dublin ahead of its $5 billion initial public offering and is considering leasing the former Bank of Ireland headquarters building. More than 350 people work at its Dublin office, set up in 2008, according to O'Leary at the IDA.

Most of the social-networking companies have leased space near the city's south docklands. That's so they can recruit one another's staff, said John Moran, managing director at Jones Lang's Irish division. Endorsement from peers "is always enormously important," which is why companies tend to cluster in a location, he said.

Moran is seeking a 165,000 square-foot headquarters building for Bank of New York Mellon in Dublin. "To find a building in the location that we want, which is primarily south docklands, it will have to be built for us because there's no pre-existing building of a size that actually suits our requirement," he said in an interview.

Financial-services and information-technology companies are expressing an interest in expanding, said Paddy Conlon, a CBRE director who advises multinationals seeking to set up or enlarge operations in Ireland. "A number of pharmaceutical companies are also looking to expand into Ireland" and others are considering moving their headquarters there, he said.

The IDA is already looking for the next wave of companies that will open in Ireland, O'Leary said. The organization keeps a list of companies run by former Google employees it encounters to identify future expansion candidates. The rapid growth of companies like Facebook, Zynga Inc. and Twitter Inc. led the IDA to set up a new unit in 2010 targeting companies with less than $30 million a year in revenue. Thirty five of them have since set up in Ireland, he said.
"We've already got the top 10 companies born of the Internet," said O'Leary. "We ain't gonna stop at that."

Read more: Google, tech firms flocking to Dublin, Ireland | Page 3 of 3

The same article although re arranged is also carried in the Washington Post not surprising really because the source for both articles was Bloomberg.

This story has appeared just before a conference in the US which is discussing the future of the cloud computing industry, including a discussion on the best locations for large data centre's from a technical and strategic viewpoint.

At least the international coverage of Ireland has improved in tenor.

A cause for a little optimism or fluff, opinions ?

[Ted Rizla]

I cant help thinking its fluff. Its great news but in the whole scheme of things it is fairly modest.
Some big labour intensive projects are required.

[Mitsui2]

I cant help thinking its fluff. Its great news but in the whole scheme of things it is fairly modest.
Some big labour intensive projects are required.

That's very true, Ted, but hell, we have to start somewhere.

And a lot of pretty depressed ears in the construction industry would suddenly perk up if they heard something like

Moran is seeking a 165,000 square-foot headquarters building for Bank of New York Mellon in Dublin. "To find a building in the location that we want, which is primarily south docklands, it will have to be built for us because there's no pre-existing building of a size that actually suits our requirement," he said in an interview.

The overarching dreams dreamt up in the Celtic Tigger years were fantasies. We're in for the long haul now, and long hauls are done one step at a time.

[OrdoVeritas]

What I don't understand is Kenny closes the Irish Embassy to the Vatican and then he's on to accept 1,000 Paypal Jobs??

[NYCKY]

Not sure exactly what Obamas new tax plan will have in store but I would suspect he has the above info in mind.

Obama to offer corporate tax plan - CNN.com

[Mitsui2]

What I don't understand is Kenny closes the Irish Embassy to the Vatican and then he's on to accept 1,000 Paypal Jobs??

Eh.....

I can see why you don't understand it. Hell, I dont even understand your linking the two things. Do you?

[JCR]

I cant help thinking its fluff. Its great news but in the whole scheme of things it is fairly modest.
Some big labour intensive projects are required.

Its not fluff, nor is it the big answer obviously - there is no big answer and there won't be announcements of huge labour intensive projects. What can be done is the seeding being laid for clusters of companies to gather and avail of shared services offshoots, service infrastructures and sharing/competiiton for employees as stated above in the article. Thats the competitive asset we can have when we can't compete on the bottom line of production and manufacturing costs themselves. The more we get in, the more will come to avail of the benefits of the cluster. If you had ten announcements per year over five years like this in one sector you would have 50,000 jobs with all the knock on employment that entails. If you can repeat something like that in other sectors you are really talking - as long as people do not start to try and use growth to kick start property and construction of course.

[Analyzer]

We have 450,000 people on the dole.

To think that the slump in property prices is actually helping us to compete. The mainstream media, including the Property Newspaper with a news supplement, has been repeating the mantra that house prices go up for ever, and that this is a great sign.

Let's not get carried away with ourselves here.

Personal debt levels are massive. Taxes are going up. There is a boom in the IT sector, which is being propped up by lower interest rates in the US Fed, and the ECB.

This is temporary. A second dot com crash, and we could be in serious trouble, concerning Facebook.

Paypal should be immune. Likewise Sky TV's jobs. But the high paid jobs, might not last.

Be careful. Another consumer spending binge is not the answer. The media seeks to programme the people into always thinking in the short term, and to never think in their own long term interest.


Concerning Dundalk, retail in Dundalk is banjaxed, and as a result Dundalk has a higher than average unemployment rate. Therefore Dundalk will be highly appreciative of the new jobs.

[TimBuckII]

Eh.....

I can see why you don't understand it. Hell, I dont even understand your linking the two things. Do you?

Paypal - Papal

[Cassandra Syndrome]

Paylove perhaps?