This article is from page 14 of the 2012-08-14 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 14 JPG
ENNIS has been officially named as the European headquar ters for Microsemi, one of the county’s largest employers.
The Ennis plant, which employs 300 people, beat off competition from Microsemi plants in Wales and Bordeaux.
According to the company, the announcement “represents a significant endorsement of the work of the Ennis facility and its contribution to the wider Microsemi global network”.
The statement continued, “Ennis has been a world-class facility and a key contributor in the manufacturing processes of the company’s high reliability products, and is well-poised to contribute to Microsemi Cor poration’s planned expansion and growth strategy.”
Ennis faced competition from Microsemi plants in Wales and France. According to Richard Finn, Vice President of Microsemi Ireland, Ennis was always in a strong position to be chosen as the company’s European base of operations.
He said, “It was something we were working on for a while. 15 years ago this was the only site in Europe but we’ve acquired a lot of countries in the past four or five years. A lot of them are small micro-units in various different countries. We’ve ended up with a total of 15 different sites and 18 different legal entities in Europe. This is an effor t to consolidate some of that and organise it a bit differently. We have all these legal and HR functions, here, for across Europe.”
He continued, “We have a site with the greatest scale. We’ve moved a lot of things in here in the last five years. Everything has worked well. We’ve a good reputation of deliver- ing what we promised. That’s probably the main reason. We have about 300 people which is well up on what it was four or five years ago.”
Microsemi provides high reliable products for aerospace programmes and satellites. Components are specially tested at Microsemi Ennis to withstand the harsh environment in space.
The Ennis facility is the largest Microsemi operation outside of the US and the company is one of the largest employers in Clare.
The announcement was made last Tuesday at a celebration commemorating the company’s 20-year anniversary in Ireland, which was attended by several senior company executives including James J. Peterson, Microsemi’s President and Chief Executive Officer.
Mr Finn added, “It’s good to get it done. We’re in Ireland for 20 years, July 1992 this site was acqui red for what was then Unitrode. It coincides with that. We’ve had our Board of Directors over here for the past three or four days for some meetings. It’s good that they are over here to see what is going on. We’ve made a lot of improvements on the site over the last five or six years.”