Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 102)
WEDNESDAY 18 JUNE 2008
MR MIKE
BIDDLE, MR
VINCE OSGOOD,
DR HERMANN
HAUSER AND
MR FERGUS
HARRADENCE
Q100 Dr Gibson: So there are star
outlets!
Mr Osgood: Yes. The 10 most concentrated
universities that we fund in this particular space will be 5 and
5-star.
Q101 Dr Gibson: Does the Government
know this?
Mr Osgood: It is in our case—whether
that has penetrated through or not—
Dr Gibson: Whether they read it or not!
Thank you very much.
Q102 Dr Iddon: Mr Hauser, one of
the attractions of Dresden, going back to that lovely city, was
the availability of skills. What is it about the availability
of skills in Dresden; is it the fact that on reunification so
many of the old industries were destroyed and therefore there
was huge unemployment at reunification, or is the federal government
of Saxony making a special effort to train skills for the electronics
industry that is clustering in Dresden? These will be different
lower skills from postgraduate skills that Dr Gibson has just
been talking about?
Mr Hauser: The two main reasons
were—one that I did not know was that Dresden was the micro-electronic
centre of the Eastern Bloc before the Iron Curtain came down,
so all the D-rams, the microprocessors that they were not able
to import from the West because of the export restrictions that
we had came out of Dresden. They had tremendous expertise. They
have a university that is the best university in the Eastern Bloc
on that, and arguably one of the best universities in electronics
in the world. The Frauenhofer Institute is associated with it,
again producing very high-quality people. In the end, our main
criterion was the availability of highly qualified operators of
the factory. My last comment on that really is that once the factory
is fully staffed and up and running, we will be employing 140
highly skilled but comparatively lowly paid operators in Dresden,
whereas we will continue to employ a hundred PhD level people
in Cambridge; so our payroll in Cambridge is considerably higher
than in Dresden.
Chairman: On that note, could I thank
you very much indeed for being splendid and very enthusiastic
witnesses this morning.
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