Israel Active

A record 521 aircraft will land and depart from Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport on Sunday, transporting some 70,000 people.  In total, 1.4 million passengers will travel through the airport during the holiday season, up to the end of the Sukkot holiday in October.

Israel’s Stratasys has inaugurated its new plant in Kiryat Gat. The factory is described as the most advanced in the world for the manufacture of 3D printers.  The new plant will have hundreds of employees, mainly from southern Israel and the inland coastal region.

The “sabra” (prickly pear in Hebrew) also gives its name to the native-born Israeli – prickly on the outside but soft inside.  Noam Blum cultivates six species of sabra on his farm.  He makes them into jams, chutney and smoothies. He plans to open a food factory to process 40,000 tons of the cactus fruit.

(Thanks to Nevet – ) Following the opening of its new Israeli office, US aerospace giant Lockheed Martin has formed a new subsidiary - Lockheed Martin Israel Ltd.  It will focus on cybersecurity, enterprise information technology, data centers, mobile, analytics and cloud.

Israel’s Mellanox has helped Yahoo! Japan improve its database performance tenfold.  Yahoo!’s Hiromune Ozaki said, “Mellanox’s FDR InfiniBand solutions enable us to handle the growth in our data in the most efficient way and improve our capability to serve our users.”

Israeli foods and flavors giant Frutarom has bought Peru’s Montana Food which also includes its Chile operation.

The $1 billion project to expand Jerusalem’s Western edge includes new malls, hotels and business parks. There will be 2,000 new hotel rooms, 230,000 square meters for industry and business, and 49,000 square meters for recreation and leisure.

Despite the economic effects of the Gaza “Protective Edge” operation, Standards and Poors has affirmed its 'A+/A-1' foreign and local currency sovereign credit ratings on Israel.  S&P expects the government to maintain stable public finances and contain security risks.

The Israeli finance and economy ministries have approved a plan by Intel to invest $6 billion in upgrading its chip-manufacturing plant in Israel, marking the largest-ever single international investment in the Jewish state.  Intel will hire 1000 more workers at its Kiryat Gat factory. =

The DLD Tel Aviv Conference included a panel of the Israeli heads of IBM, General Motors, Qualcomm, Deutsch Telekom and Google. All agreed that Israel’s superb engineering talent is due to strong academic institutions, entrepreneurial and creative spirit, hard working and a “can-do” attitude.