British construction materials company Breedon Group will invest £5m to build a new concrete tile plant in Lisburn to replace the existing facility originally built by the Lagan Group in 1995. It comes in response to soaring demand for tiles for the housing market in both Ireland and Britain. The new plant will come on stream in late-2023 and will see a doubling in production volumes from 11 million to 22 million tiles a year. Breedon, which paid £455m to acquire Lagan Group in 2018, employs 3,500 people across the UK and Ireland, including 250 in Northern Ireland.
The Irish News revealed that Oxfordshire-based call centre TieTa UK, originally set up to support a payday lender, was Northern Ireland’s biggest cash recipient in a new London-controlled scheme set up to replace EU structural funding. Despite having no physical operation in the north, the Banbury-based firm was awarded £1.82m under the Northern Ireland tranche of the UK Community Renewal Fund (UKCRF), while Invest NI had its two bids rejected.
Dublin and Belfast-based technology and digital transformation provider Version 1, which also has operations in Spain and India, completed another significant acquisition. It bought UK-based service design and digital transformation specialists Evoco Digital Services for an undisclosed sum. It was the 13th purchase for Version 1 and follows the acquisition the previous June of Belfast-based Neueda, which took the business to beyond 2,000 employees and took revenue projections to €200 million.
Danske Bank outlined plans to expand services into Britain for the first time. The bank said it will “pursue small pockets of opportunity for growth”. Danske said it has loaned £300 million to the social housing sector in England, as well as being active in the syndicated lending space, and on the personal banking side, it launched a carbon neutral mortgage through a number of select brokers in the south of England. The news came as Danske posted a pre-tax profit of £61.3m in 2021 - up from £13.1m in 2020.
Owners of the newly-opened Game of Thrones Studio Tour in Banbridge said the facility “could have as big an impact on tourism in Northern Ireland as the Titanic Belfast attraction in terms of being world-leading”. Warner Bros Themed Entertainment said the £40 million location at Linen Mill Studios will be “an undoubted economic game-changer” for the region. The 110,000 sq ft interactive experience has provided jobs for 120 people, and Warner said early bookings had exceeded initial expectations.
Newry-born technology specialist Justin Mullen seen his cloud company secure $10.3 million in seed funding, enabling it to scale-up rapidly, attract more talent, and expand further into North America. An experienced leader in enterprise data engineering and management, he co-founded and is chief executive of DataOps.live. Founded in 2018, it received the funding from Anthos Capital and also Silicon Valley-based Snowflake Ventures, which in its first year made more than a dozen investments representing more than $100 million in capital.
The Showgrounds Retail Park in Omagh is sold to a Boston based investment group for £16.5 million. Columbia Threadneedle acquired the 90,000 sq ft asset in an off-market deal. Developed in 2002, the retail park was last sold by the Ballymena-based Corbo group in 2015 to Tristan Capital Partners and Pradera for £26.7m. The site is home to Marks & Spencer, Argos, Next, River Island and Sports Direct. The deal was completed quietly, with the retail park packaged into a wider portfolio of UK retail assets sold by Tristan Capital. Columbia Threadneedle employs 2,500 people and manage £557 billion in investment assets across 19 countries.
