If there are any Cantonese-speaking midlanders, the international bookmakers William Hill would like to meet them and offer them jobs.
The firm runs a call centre in the Kilmartin Industrial Estate on the edge of Athlone where it processes bets for customers in the UK and in continental Europe.
The bets phoned to the Athlone centre are processed there and communicated to Antigua where they are accepted. They cannot be accepted in Ireland to protect our local industry.
According to Mr William Geaves, Hill's call centre director, the Athlone centre has been a great success since it came on line at the beginning of this year.
The company employs 150 telephonists here and has plans to expand the operation, which can now deal with Internet and mobile phone requests.
The company has already filled the first part of the building it occupies, and with the new technologies being implemented it will recruit a further 50 people.
"Because we get bets from all over the UK and the Continent and this is a help centre, we are looking for people with languages and one of those is Cantonese," said Mr Geaves.
"We are also seeking people who can speak German and Italian if they are available. We like to employ local people as far as possible but it may not be possible to get Cantonese speakers here," he said.
Mr Geaves said those with languages would be particularly welcome to apply if they had a good solid education with good keyboard skills and some writing and communication skills for the Internet service centre.
He noted that the problems of holding on to staff for the centre were more or less the same as they had experienced in their UK call centres.
"However, we are very pleased with the calibre of the staff here and already quite a few of them have moved up the ladder into supervisory and managerial areas," he said. "We are very happy overall with the operation here in Ireland and it is expanding."
Recently the company signed a deal with the English cable company Telewest, so its customers can now place bets using their television set, which they don't even have to switch off while making the transaction.