The Seagate closure is a blow to North's Minister for Finance Peter Robinson's ambitious projections for inward investment, writes Francess McDonnell
Most people will never need to know there is a place in Derry's Altnagelvin Area Hospital known as the "Seagate Room".
They are the lucky ones - those who are aware of the Seagate Room are either patients or have loved ones who are receiving treatment in the hospital's chemotherapy unit.
It has not always been known as the Seagate Room - in fact before this month it was just known as the unit's waiting area.
That was before Seagate Technology and its Limavady employees made a donation of more than €12,000 in memory of one of their former colleagues, Jean McCallion.
The donation has transformed the former waiting area, according to Liz England, the Macmillan lead nurse for cancer services at Altnagelvin.
The hospital decided to rename the waiting area as the Seagate Room as a tribute to the generosity of the company and its employees.
The "Seagate Room" may not be the most important financial investment Seagate Technology has made since the US group first came to Northern Ireland more than 13 years ago, but it does reflect the huge contribution it has made to the community.
Seagate opened its first facility in Springtown in Derry in 1993.
Today the facility employs over 1,300 people in the development and manufacture of read-write heads for hard drives. It boasts that it uses some of the most advanced technology in existence and is the largest factory of its type in the recording head industry.
Four years after Seagate established its Derry operation, it opened a sister site in Limavady. Yesterday it announced that after 10 years and millions of euro of investment in the Limavady site, it will walk away from it next year with the loss of more than 900 full-time and temporary jobs.
The Limavady plant manufactures high-quality, super-polished aluminium substrates for use in Seagate hard drives.
The plant had previously been the only internal supplier of substrates, which are used in a variety of Seagate hard drives. These are then employed in desktop computers, servers and X-boxes.
Limavady was a key supplier to Seagate's recording media operations facilities in Woodlands, Singapore and Milpitas, California, producing more than 200,000 substrates a day.
The Limavady plant was not only a key component supplier in the Seagate family, but it also boasted an internationally recognised centre of excellence for substrate development.
The centre of excellence was one of the reasons why Seagate's Limavady employees believed the US group would continue to invest and maintain the plant.
There had been fears last year when Seagate expanded other substrate manufacturing facilities in Singapore and Malaysia that Limavady would suffer some job losses, but most people believed the world-class facility could hold its own, despite the cost pressures.
Seagate Technology is a massive economic force in the northwest - it contributes more than €65 million annually in wages and salaries, and spends more than €15 million with local suppliers.
The group has insisted that its other facility in Derry will not be affected by its decision to close its Limavady operation, but Philip McDonagh, chief economist with PricewaterhouseCoopers, says the economic impact of the Limavady closure will be still severe.
"It is a big blow because the multiplier effect of this on the local economy in terms of wages and salaries will be very significant, particularly because these are high value- added jobs, which in most circumstances are not easily transferable."
The issue of high value-added jobs is top of the Northern Ireland government's agenda at the moment.
Less than a week ago, the Minister for Finance Peter Robinson published the Executive's first draft budget for 2008-2011. In it he made it very clear that the Executive sees the creation of new, high-paying, high-delivering jobs as the key to solving some of the North's economic problems.
At the heart of Mr Robinson's first budget is his ambition to grow "a dynamic, innovative economy". The Minister has allocated the North's regional economic development agency additional funds to pursue new inward investment, and he has set an ambitious target of creating 6,000 new jobs from these new investment projects by 2011.
In order to achieve this, Northern Ireland needs to attract new inward investors who will create the type of jobs that Seagate is relocating from Limavady to the Far East.
Seagate has no complaints about Northern Ireland as an investment location - in fact Invest Northern Ireland uses the American group as an example of one of its success stories when it is selling the North as an "an established centre of excellence in telecommunications and electronics technologies".
Seagate has told the North's Minister for Enterprise Nigel Dodds the reason it plans to close its Limavady operation is simply because of "changes in market dynamics".
The Minister said yesterday that he had been assured that this decision "was not a reflection of the performance of the Limavady plant or its workforce but is a direct result of significantly lower wage costs in Asian competitors, foreign exchange and shipping costs, which have created a competitive cost gap of some £15 million per year".
One of the big challenges the Minister and his colleagues face is attracting the right kind of jobs to Northern Ireland - the right kind of investor who will make a difference to the local economy.
According to Michael Smyth from the University of Ulster's school of economics and politics, the Executive's strategy of pursuing high-value jobs is the right one for Northern Ireland.
"The loss of the jobs at Seagate's Limavady facility is a big blow, but the segment of the market which Seagate operates in is changing very rapidly, and unfortunately this type of investment is very mobile. In the past Northern Ireland didn't have to sell itself - that's all changed; there are no freebies now, no handouts and Northern Ireland has to compete."
Seagate Technology is still an important investor in Northern Ireland - it still has an important contribution to make in helping build a new economy in the North. But the legacy of its Limavady facility cannot just be the very valuable contribution it made to a hospital - no matter how important a role that plays in many people's lives.