It’s official: American companies are NOT in Ireland for tax reasons.
Well, at last according to John Roberts the CEO and co-founder of SugarCRM confirmed yesterday:
John Roberts, CEO and co-founder of commercial, open source, Silicon Valley firm SugarCRM, which has its European headquarters in Dublin, will be heading to the inaugural Irish Web Technology conference on Thursday not just to give a talk but also to scout around for several new employees.
“We made a bet on Ireland and Dublin over a year ago in the hope there would be sharp engineering talent here and it has been great so far. This conference is validation that Ireland gets web technology,” said Roberts.
Locating European headquarters in Dublin wasn’t just for tax reasons, said Roberts, it was more due to the fact that as well as having a strong, emerging tech workforce, the energy in Dublin city is much like that of Silicon Valley and the cultures match well: both have a very progressive state of mind.
So just if you have been wondering why is SugarCRM here in Dublin? It is NOT for the tax reasons, it is the strong tech workforce, etc, etc.
Ehm,… and 50% of the techies being interviewed for new jobs in Ireland today are ‘imported’ mostly from Eastern Europe.
We seem to have managed to create an interesting formula really. We market Ireland as a cool place to live to the Eastern Europeans, and lure American corporate to set up here for the tax reasons. The result is that we get the American corporations here hiring Poles, Ukrainians, and the rest of them. It is a win-win-win scenario really:
I wonder what would David McWilliams say to that…. :)