Kodak to create 300 jobs in Cork

THE giant US company Eastman Kodak is to create around 300 new jobs in Youghal, Co Cork, with an £18 million investment in a recordable compact disc plant.

The new jobs, which will be officially announced by Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Mr Richard Bruton, at a reception in Cork this afternoon, will be created over the next three years. Recruitment will begin next month and up to 160 people will be employed by the end of this year.

Eastman Kodak, best known as a photographic company, also operates in a number of other related areas including electronic imaging band compact disc technology.

The plant, which will occupy an existing 48,000 sq ft facility in Youghal, will produce recordable or writable compact discs which are used to store up to 630 megabytes of computer information.

Compact discs are more durable than magnetic tape, which is currently the most common format on which large amounts of data are stored.

However, the cost of both recordable CDs and the hardware drives needed to write on the discs has been falling dramatically in recent years.

The cost of a single writable compact disc was about £40 initially but this dropped to £12 last year, and some companies are now buying the discs in bulk for as little as £4 each. The price of the hardware drives needed to write the data on to the disks has also fallen, putting the technology within the reach of individuals for the first time.

Writable compact discs are now used extensively in data retrieval systems such as electronic libraries. They are also used by computer software companies for smaller product runs and early beta test versions of new programmes.

Eastman Kodak employs 98,400 people around the world, 55,300 of them in the US. It has annual sales in excess of $ 13.5 billion (£8.55 billion), about half of which come from outside the US.

It established its digital and applied imaging division in 1994 to build on Kodak's existing strengths in this area. It has subsequently set the industry standard for CD recordable discs.