Costa Rica Boston Scientific

Boston Scientific opens second plant in Costa Rica

Boston Scientific, a medical manufacturing industry, opened its second manufacturing plant in Costa Rica. Foreign direct investment may be down as a result of the financial crisis, but a long-planned project that will provide nearly 2,000 new jobs in Costa Rica’s Central Valley by 2011 has come to pass.
Boston Scientific, a top-tier producer of medical devices, opened its second production facility in Costa Rica Tuesday. It is a massive new investment that will provide new jobs to workers across the economic and educational spectrum during the next two years.
With its second facility – located in the Propark free-trade zone in Coyol, near Alajuela – the company has almost doubled its original 2004 investment in Costa Rica.
The nearly $30 million Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-certified building – the first manufacturing building to be certified a “green building” in Latin America – is an airy and well-lighted, sprawling facility of 129,000 square meters.
The company, which already employs 1,700 workers in its Costa Rican operations, expects to double the number of employees during the next two years, said Jorge Perera, the company’s vice president of operations in Costa Rica.
The new jobs will range across the educational spectrum, from highly specialized engineering positions to trained, technical personnel who will piece together the intricate devices for which the company is known worldwide. Some 60 percent of the new employees will be technical workers who are not required to have university degrees.The other 40 percent will be positions that require higher education, Perera said.
d specialized, manual workers,” Perera said. “But it’s not just anyone. They need to have a lot of preparation, so we invest a lot in personnel training.”
At the elaborate opening ceremony, President Oscar Arias spoke of the innovative reputation of not only the company, but of the city of Boston, where he attended Boston University.
“(Boston) is a city where it’s not important the hat on top of your head, but the ideas inside it,” Arias said.