Eli Lilly office block will add capacity for 500 new jobs in Cork
US pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly is set to add capacity for about 500 new jobs in Cork.
The company has signed contracts for a new €20m office building in Little Island, which will be its second in the city's Eastgate Business Park.
If the capacity of a new office block is fully realised in the future, the move would more than double the company's work force at its Little Island base to around 1,000. It already employs 400 people.
Construction is due begin in the coming weeks and is expected to be completed in 2019.
The Irish Examiner's Tommy Barker reports that developers O’Flynn Group are set to build the €20m, 70,000 sq ft office block, capable of housing up to 500 workers, for pharma giant Lilly’s Global Business Solutions Centre in Eastgate.
The Lilly deal, a long time in the offing for the 120-acre business park just east of the Jack Lynch Tunnel, will see the O’Flynn Group construct this second, fourth-generation office building to be called Island Hall.
It is to go right next to Lilly’s existing Cork offices footprint, Island House, which they secured from O’Flynn Group at Eastgate in 2013 at a €10m-plus cost.
Now, Lilly are further expanding that presence, bringing their space there up to 135,000 sq ft of offices, and clearly signalling the arrival of several hundred more diverse back-office service jobs locating to Cork in the next few years.
Pharma giant Eli Lilly has been in Ireland since 1976, and has been manufacturing in Dunderrow, Kinsale since 1981, where it employs 500, plus hundreds of contractors, and is actively expanding into the biopharma sector, with a new €200m plant under way.
