Youghal avoids new Kodak cuts

Eastman Kodak's 240 employees in Youghal, Co Cork, will not be further affected by its plans for additional redundancies worldwide…

Eastman Kodak's 240 employees in Youghal, Co Cork, will not be further affected by its plans for additional redundancies worldwide, the company said last night.

In New York, Kodak said it would include a $1.5 billion (£1 billion) restructuring and revaluation charge in its next quarterly results and eliminate 6,600 more jobs than the 10,000 announced last October.

During the autumn restructuring, the Youghal plant let go 120 employees, but the company said yesterday that sales had been rising, and 30 of those made redundant had already been re-hired, although not all on a permanent basis. There were now around 240 people working in Youghal, Kodak said.

At the start of this year, the firm had promised to create an additional 360 jobs in Youghal, which would have brought total employment there to 610 by the end of 1998. The Youghal facility is the first of its kind in Europe, manufacturing writable compact discs which allow users to encode them.

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This proposed expansion would have brought the company's planned investment in the Republic to £157 million.

One month previously, Kodak had announced separate plans to invest £100 million in Limerick's national technological park, which would create 400 jobs by 2001, manufacturing Advanced Photo System (APS), a new type of film cassette. The company said yesterday that construction work was continuing as normal on the Limerick project.

The company said its worldwide employment level could fluctuate, up or down, depending on additional portfolio decisions that might increase the number of positions to be eliminated or outsourced, and as growth in emerging markets, acquisitions and new technologies added to employment.