SPX confirms 160 new jobs at shared service centre
SPX Corporation, a $6bn turnover US manufacturing group, is creating 160 jobs at a new shared service centre in Manchester. SPX selected Manchester in preference to Birmingham and been looking for 20,000 sq ft of office space in the city's southern suburbs with the help of property agents CB RIchard Ellis. Inward investment agency MIDAS today confirmed that Manchester had been selected and said the exact location of the centre would be confirmed before the end of 2009. MIDAS said SPX was attracted by the fact that Manchester is already home to a cluster of shared service centres. Other factors were the skilled local labour force with a wide range of language skills; cheap property and air connections via Manchester Airport.
SPX will open the centre in the second quarter of 2010 and it will handle human resources, finance, payroll and other key support services for SPX's operations in 18 European countries. Mary Sczudlo, vice-president, chief financial officer for Global Shared Services at SPX, said: “To improve the efficiency and effectiveness of SPX worldwide we developed a plan to establish regional SSCs around the world. A centre was established in Shanghai and the next stage of the plan is to deliver a SSC for Europe.
“MIDAS and NWDA proved to us that Manchester has everything we need to make the SSC a success – the location, the infrastructure with excellent transport connectivity overseas and most importantly, the existing SSCs and highly impressive talent pool.” Rachel Green, head of business development at MIDAS who led the team working with SPX, said: “The arrival of the SPX SSC shows that Manchester is competing with and beating other major cities throughout Europe and indeed worldwide for such projects...Greater Manchester is increasingly being shortlisted for this type of pan-European operation because we have a proven offering that ticks all the boxes.”
Mark Hughes, executive director for economic development at the NWDA, said: “This year the UKTI revealed that the number of inward investment projects secured in the North West over the last financial year had risen to the highest recorded number for the region, despite the difficult economic conditions...Securing significant investments from US companies such as SPX is key to building on this success. Foreign Investment plays a very important part in the North West economy with over 17 per cent of our economic power (GVA) is accounted for by foreign owned companies operating in the North West.”
SPX, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, specialises in flow technology, test and measurement services, thermal equipment and services and industrial products and services. The business has employees in more than 40 countries. Its products are used in the energy, power, infrastructure and automobile industries and include cooling systems for nuclear power plants. One of its subsidiaries is APV, a supplier of process engineering and automation solutions to the food and healthcare sector, which has an office in West Sussex, currently SPX's only presence in the UK.
