Tony O’Reilly
The FT profiles Tony O’Reilly who has sustained huge financial losses recently, not least with the placing of Waterford Wedgwood into receivership. O’Reilly of course is the effective controlling shareholder of the NZ Herald, which reputedly is on the block.
The article is wroth reading, not least for the fact that O’Reilly having made a fortune outside of Ireland put a lot of it into Irish companies,albeit it would now appear not wholly successfully.
There are perhaps some parallels with NZ in O’Reilly’s story.
Adam found a comment in the article especially interesting:-
Sir Anthony O’Reilly tells a story that when he acquired Waterford Wedgwood in 1990 he took the company’s Irish trade union representatives to New York so they could eavesdrop on US shoppers.
The former Irish and British Lions rugby star, who had established himself as Ireland’s best known businessman, was keen to demonstrate that US consumers were buying a brand, not an Irish-made product. His subliminal message was that Waterford stemwear could be made anywhere in the world without affecting its consumer appeal.
On the face of it, it seems he failed to heed his own lesson, with receivers this week appointed at the luxury goods company and his resignation as chairman. Most experts blame the high Irish cost-base for crippling Waterford Wedgwood.
Ireland has often been held out as a beacon for NZ to follow. It would be useful to understand just what made ireland a high cost location for a company such as Waterford Wedgwood.
Before anybody comments that Adam is seeking to keep NZ wages low. He is not. However, in seeking to grow NZ economy and wages, it is important that we attract sectors where we can add value and productivity such as to permit significant wages uplift to improve personal incomes. Thus some types of business activity may be unsuitable.
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Ah, but remember Helen and Phil Gaffe talking about how we should emulate Ireland
How could they be wrong
you realise ireland is screwed now. dell is moving its eu pc assembly to poland. equivalent to 5% of irish gdp but employing only 2000 people. Its manufacturing miracle was always based on a con. chinese components. “assembled” (ie put a monitor box, a pc box and a keyboard box together and call it a pc) in ireland to take advantage of eu trade laws.
JC
Many thanks for the enlightening comment and for adding to the point made
Adam
Back in 2005 when the British and Irish Lions came out for their tour, Tony O’Reilly was interviewed by the Rugby Channel. In the course of a long interview O’Reilly told the story of coming back from being away from Ireland for a long time, and in the taxi from the airport he asked his taxi driver how things were going..
O’reilly put on a wonderful working class brogue to explain what the driver said as he reeled off all the wonderful economic and social things happening in Ireland which finished up with “And best of all, it’s being paid for by the f*%ken Krauts under the EU policies!’
O’Reilly, of course, was responding to a question about the Irish Miracle, and how it could be replicated in NZ.. and was making the point that Ireland had near a billion consumers on it’s doorstep and many more billions of EU subsidies and economic policies that made the miracle possible. Therein lay the seeds of Irish prosperity.. and also the seeds of corruption and disaster.
And back in 1988, I was hosting a UK parliamentary select committee looking into best practice for a major forest planting programme in England.. they wanted to plant up productive land to reduce agricultural over production.
They mentioned subsidies they were prepared to pay to effect the land use change over, and they were scandalously high.. perhaps 20 times actual cost that would go directly to the farmers bank account. When I mentioned something about this the senior MP gave me an idea of the subsidies being paid to produce unneeded food.. and they were vastly worse!
The post war prosperity of Europe and America was based on technological advances, subsidies and the Baby Boom.. when the babies stopped coming Europe got 20 million Muslim immigrants and the US tens of millions of Hispanics to keep the boom rolling and the punters spending.. what Ireland appears to have done is remove the economic and social obstacles it had in order to cash in.
NZ was never so lucky (or unlucky) to have had those advantages.
JC