Technology firm Dell will add 200 employees to its staff numbers as the company opens its banking services in Ireland.
That number is expected to grow to 300 as Dell Financial Services expands.
The company, which has been awarded a banking licence by the Central Bank, will offer direct financing to its business customers, offering commercial loans and leases to small, medium and large enterprise customers in Ireland, the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
Dell will establish the EMEA headquarters of Dell Financial Services in Ireland, creating 200 jobs at its Dublin campus in the first phase of the project.
Minister for Finance Michael Noonan said it was “very important” to have sources of finance other than traditional banks available in the economy and that what Dell was doing was “totally in line with Government policy” in the area.
“Europe has to change and Ireland has to change because the banks got such a hit in recent times that to get Europe growing the way we want to you need other sources of credit,” he said.
The company, which currently employs around 2,500 people at its campuses in Limerick, Cork and Dublin, has located a strategic global hub for operations, services and sales in Ireland, along with an EMEA solution centre and its first Cloud R&D centre.
In recent years, Dell has shifted its business towards providing an end-to-end solution for companies as PC sales declined.
Along with peers including Compaq and Hewlett- Packard, Dell rode a wave of growth as PCs became mainstream in the late 1980s and 1990s. The company also flourished by pioneering low-cost manufacturing and direct shipping to customers. But it fell out of step with consumers over the last half a dozen years as people lost their appetite for desktops and laptops and gravitated instead to smartphones and tablets.
Minister for Jobs Richard Bruton said Dell had grown and changed its business model from predominantly being a PC maker to an international services provider. Mr Bruton said this was a position the Government was familiar with having had to change the trajectory of the Irish economy in the last two and a half years.
He said Ireland was moving from being “an economy that was perhaps locked on to a sector that was not sustainable, in property, and we’re getting back to what is important for a small open economy being able to provide services, provide product and win markets internationally.”
Taoiseach Enda Kenny said the Government had tried to set out an agenda to restore good health and to economy and give the “young people coming behind us a chance.”
“I hope when we have all details for budget, we can use that as a stepping stone to emerge from the bailout and send out a signal internationally that in a country where people and government work together in the pragmatic approach to dealing with problems, that these things do work. “
Earlier this month Dell chief executive Michael Dell won shareholder approval for a planned $24.9 billion buyout, capping a seven-month standoff with investors and gaining free rein to attempt a turnaround of the struggling personal-computer maker outside the glare of public markets.
The victory ends the jousting between the buyout group and investors led by billionaire Carl Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management.
(Additional reporting - Bloomberg)
