TechMarketView – and Richard Holway in particular - has written avidly about UK job creation over the last few months, emphasising the ‘good’ that companies can do – whether UK HQ’ed or not – to the UK economy by creating jobs (particularly entry-level jobs for young people). For example, see ‘Surge in UK tech jobs’ and ‘Corporate Citizenship’.
Fujitsu is one company that can hold its head up high. In July we highlighted (see ‘Fujitsu’s ‘Vote of Confidence’ on UK’) that its number of UK employees stood at 14k, up 3.6% compared to 2012), that it generates some £1.8b in UK revenues, and last year took on 1,800 people – one third in the all-important 16-24 year age range. Fujitsu told us that this was “a level of job creation we intend to maintain”.
Supporting that comment, yesterday the company announced the creation of a further 192 jobs in Derry/Londonderry, including 177 full-time positions and 15 business apprenticeships, bringing the total number of employees in Northern Ireland up to 1,000 across four locations. It is anticipated that recruitment will start in the New Year. This is being made possible with an anticipated investment of £12m from Fujitsu over the next three years as well as over £990k of support from Invest Northern Ireland towards the fulltime positions. According to Fujitsu, this brings its total investment in the Northern Ireland economy to over £36m during this period.
Fujitsu’s local and devolved government business has had particular success in the devolved regions of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, contributing to the company’s Top 5 positioning in our rankings of SITS suppliers to the UK local and devolved government sector. Our latest UK local government supplier SITS supplier landscape report will be available to subscribers of PublicSectorViews next week.