GLEN DIMPLEX boss Seán O’Driscoll was in the headlines recently calling for a long-term pay freezes in Ireland to make us more competitive.

On Wednesday, he took a different tack when addressing a breakfast hosted by the Dublin Chamber of Commerce. He started out by nailing the perception that Glen Dimplex is all about low-cost manufacturing in the Far East. “It isn’t. We have 26 factories around the world; one of those is in China,” he said.

“We operate in many, many high-cost countries and we can do it profitably.”

Four of those facilities are in Ireland and six in Britain. “That is to debunk once and for all that Glen Dimplex is all about China.”

“We’re also more than a heating business,” he said, adding that, for example, it supplies a cooling system to Philips, Siemens and GE for their CAT scan and MRI machines.

“Yesterday, I was with Siemens Medical in Germany where we were planning their new generation of MRI machines and what we were going to be doing with them in partnering over the next few years.”

O’Driscoll then gave a long assessment of the challenges of renewable energy in Ireland.

The bad news is that, in the short term at least, we will pay more for our electricity as providers try to get us to change our habits so that Ireland can reduce its emissions by 40 per cent by 2020.

On a brighter note, smart-metering technology is being developed that will tell us how much energy each appliance is using, something that should help us keep the bills down. This information will be stored for five years.

Glen Dimplex is switched on to the opportunities in smart metering. O’Driscoll said it will announce “a major strategic alliance in the coming weeks”, with a pilot programme planned for the UK from November.