It’s all change at Enterprise Ireland. On Friday, it appointed Jenny Melia as its chief executive and one of her key tasks will be to implement its new five-year strategy, which has just been put into effect.
A lot has changed since EI’s last three-year plan, not least the return to the White House of Donald Trump and his threat to impose tariffs and other measures on the rest of the world.
Suddenly, our pharma exports and the financial spin off they yield, are under major threat, along with billions in corporate tax revenues from Big Tech firms, which fund many of our essential day-to-day services.
On Wednesday, EI chairman Michael Carey and interim CEO Kevin Sherry gave a presentation on the new strategy in Tokyo to 100-plus Irish business leaders who had travelled to the country as part of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year programme’s CEO retreat.
“It has an underlying ambition to ensure that indigenous Irish businesses, Irish exporting companies and international trading companies... that those businesses become the primary driving force of the Irish economy to provide a counterbalance for the great success of FDI [foreign direct investment] and the great work that the IDA do,” Carey said.
Scaling is a potential “game changer”, he said, adding that the ambition is to establish a large fund (a mix of State resources and private sector money) that would allow it write larger cheques for companies with the ambition to become “the next Kerry Group or Smurfit”.
That step change in funding is a big gap in the system at the moment.
EI’s ambition is to seed the next generation of Irish multinationals.
According to Carey, EI is the largest private equity investor in Europe, a fact previously unknown to Cantillon. Now is the time to build on that expertise.
As an entrepreneur himself, Carey should be well placed to help EI deliver on its new strategy. When appointed in 2023, he was the first EI chairman to have been a client of the agency, and his biscuit manufacturer East Coast Bakehouse is itself trying to scale into markets outside Ireland.
