Europe

Kraft Foods has opened a £17 million research and development facility at the home of Cadbury in Birmingham.

Facilities at the Global Centre of Excellence for Chocolate Research and Development in Bournville will include innovation labs, a pilot plant and a development kitchen. The centre will also be used to develop new products for other Kraft brands such as Milka and Toblerone.

The investment comes as the company said it will hire an extra 100 R&D staff in the UK, with 44 of those to be based at Bournville.

Dublin Port Company has unveiled its masterplan for the next 30 years, which includes the construction of a new cruise facility to accommodate over 135,000 passengers and almost 90 cruise liners each season.

The masterplan sets out the framework for the long-term development of Ireland’s largest port. Implementing the plan will cost in excess of €600 millionover the next 30 years, with the Dublin Port Company already committing to investing €110 million over the first five years of the masterplan period.

Britain’s last remaining train factory has been thrown a lifeline with the announcement of the four shortlisted bidders for the Crossrail rolling stock and depot contract.

The Derby-based Bombardier Transportation (UK) factory is up against bids from Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles of Spain; Hitachi Rail Europe; and Germany’s Siemens.

Crossrail will require around 60 new trains, each around 200 metres in length and able to carry up to 1,500 passengers, with key features to be air conditioning and inter-connecting walk-through carriages.

Hotel and restaurant group Whitbread has announced it will create 10,000 new jobs in the UK over the next three years.

The new jobs will come as a result of Whitbread’s rapid expansion of its Premier Inn and Costa Coffee businesses, which already saw the creation of 2,500 jobs in the 2011/12 period.

Whitbread increased the number of Costa Coffee stores in the UK by 158 to 1,375 during the last year, and now has plans for an additional 10,000 Premier Inn rooms.

Premier Oil has awarded a contract to Wood Group PSN for the delivery of integrated operations and maintenance support services to the Balmoral floating production vessel (FPV).

The contract, estimated to be worth around £250 million, will see Wood Group PSN provide managed onshore and offshore operations and maintenance services, including the management of selected procurement and logistics support.

Norway’s Statoil and partner ExxonMobil have made a large gas discovery in the Zafarani exploration well offshore Tanzania. 

Logging results have shown what Statoil is calling a “high impact discovery”, so far proving up to five trillion cubic feet of gas in-place.

The well has encountered 120 metres of excellent quality reservoir with high porosity and high permeability, Statoil said. The gas-water contact has not been established and drilling operations are ongoing.

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), one of the world’s leading hotel companies, has announced it will create nearly 3,000 new jobs across its 275 UK hotels over the next three years, including over 1,100 new jobs this year.

IHG, which operates brands such as Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza, is also launching a new hospitality training Academy in London.

Another tale of “are they or aren’t they” emerged today in relation to a possible alliance of some kind between General Motors and PSA Peugeot Citroen.

It has been widely reported that the two car makers are talking to each other, and have been for some time, but at the time of writing neither company has confirmed this.

Shell Exploration & Production (Shell Bidco) has made an offer of £992.4 million for East Africa-focused Cove Energy.

UK-based Cove's primary asset is its 8.5 per cent stake in the Rovuma Offshore Area 1 in Mozambique, where operator Anadarko has found over 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Rovuma offshore basin is a frontier exploration area, holding large resources of natural gas reserves suitable for LNG projects.