Kenny says Ireland has become more competitive

IRELAND’S COMPETITIVENESS has “significantly improved” in the past few years, Taoiseach Enda Kenny told a gathering of business leaders yesterday.

Addressing a conference on Irish competitiveness organised by the US embassy in Dublin, Mr Kenny pointed out that Ireland had regained its position as one of the world’s top 20 countries for competitiveness in the IMD World Competitiveness rankings published last week.

“We are number one in the world for the availability of skilled labour and we are second in the world for productivity and efficiency,” he said.

Mr Kenny added that the European Commission anticipated that Irish unit labour costs would fall by a cumulative 16.5 per cent from 2009 to 2013. In contrast, unit labour costs in the euro area as a whole were forecast to increase by close to 6.7 per cent over the same period. “These projections show that Ireland’s relative position will have improved by around 22 per cent vis-a-vis the euro area since 2009,” he said.

Heinz chief executive Bill Johnson said Ireland needed “continued fiscal discipline and the courage to make further tough decisions” if it was to achieve financial stability and renewed growth.

He said Heinz’s factory in Dundalk, Co Louth, which employs about 230 people and produces more than 60 million frozen meals annually for the Irish, British, French and Swedish markets, was “a very stable facility”.

“Our business in Ireland has not been affected like some of our other businesses in terms of downsizing. We have a very capable business here.”

Heinz has reduced manufacturing capacity by 25 per cent since 2007 and closed nine out of 81 factories around the world last year.

Speaking after the conference, Mr Johnson, who succeeded Sir Anthony O’Reilly as chief executive of the Pittsburgh-headquartered company in 1998, said he believed Europe could recapture some of the manufacturing business it had lost in recent years.

“I think manufacturing is going to return to the West. Labour costs are continuing to rise in Asia. I think the biggest impediment to that has been governments’ unwillingness to help manufacturing to come back in – very stringent environmental rules, inflexibility in terms of the way they react to businesses.”

Heinz had sales of $11.6 billion (€9.2 billion) in its last fiscal year and delivered full-year earnings per share of $3.35. Its business in Ireland had annual sales approaching $100 million.