Invest NI helped promote 810 jobs across Mid Ulster

End of year results from Invest NI show that 234 of the new jobs promoted were as a result of assistance provided through the Regional Start Initiative. 459 new start up businesses were assisted by Invest NI in 2013-14.

The year also saw a 66 per cent increase in the number of companies in Mid Ulster taking advantage of skills support to improve their competitiveness.

Mary Gormley, Invest NI’s Western Regional Manager said: “The statistics clearly show that business confidence across the council area is strengthening and many more companies are turning to Invest NI assistance to enable them to improve their competitiveness to be able to benefit from the improving economic conditions locally and internationally.

“Another important measure is the significant growth in business starts with assistance provided through Invest NI’s Regional Start Initiative. Overall new business starts virtually doubled during the year, which bodes well for the Mid Ulster economy in the years ahead.”

Invest NI has put in place processes to enable accurate reporting of the actual number of jobs created as a direct result of the projects which it has assisted. In doing so, Invest NI is the first development agency in the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland to report in this way across all its job support initiatives.

“We now have the ability to analyse all offers of financial support which were ‘live’ at the beginning of our Corporate Plan period (2011-12) and extracted job creation against these offers. This shows that 1,976 new jobs have been created in total in Mid Ulster in the last three years,” added Mary.