Seagate invests £120m in UK factory

Disk drive manufacturer expects to ship a billion hard disk drives in the next five years

Seagate's Londonderry factory makes read-write heads for hard disk drives

Hard disk drive maker Seagate is to invest £120m in extending its Londonderry factory to produce greater volumes of read-write heads for its products.

Despite a growing preference for using solid state rather than spinning disk hard drives in notebook PCs and servers, Seagate is confident that it will ship a billion hard drives within the next five years and needs to scale up production to meet anticipated demand.

The Londonderry manufacturing plant was opened in 1994 and employs about 1,300 people recruited from Northern Ireland and other European countries.