WILD GEESE: Emigrant business leaders on opportunities abroad:Gerry Lenihan, CEO Alfoldi Tej, Hungary's biggest milk processor

IT IS A long way from Dublin to the little town of Paszto in northern Hungary – especially when you travel via Sudan – but it is a journey that Gerry Lenihan is more than happy to have made.

Lenihan is now chief executive of Alfoldi Tej, Hungary’s biggest milk processor, and he is based in the capital, Budapest.

The skills that took him to the top of a sector that is still deeply wary of foreign involvement were learned well beyond the citys genteel confines.

Born in Dublin in 1962, Lenihan graduated in business studies from the National Institute of Higher Education – now Dublin City University – before qualifying as an accountant with Stokes Kennedy Crowley and Co before it became part of industry behemoth KPMG.

After taking his articles in Dublin, Lenihan was, he recalls with a smile, “keen to do something different”.

“I joined Irish NGO Concern as an accountant and financial manager in Sudan. I was based in Khartoum but saw lots of the country, overseeing the budget and accounts and reporting to funding agencies.

“It was very interesting and Sudan was quite a big project when I was there in 1989-90. There was a war between the north and south of the country, big emergency programmes and ongoing development programmes,” Lenihan adds.

“We were probably spending about €20 million a year and we had about 40 expat staff and 600 Sudanese.”

After the excitement of Sudan, Lenihan returned to Ireland only to seek another way to leave.

“I spent half a year temping in banks while I looked for a job outside Ireland,” he says over coffee in a cafe near his home on the leafy Buda side of the Danube river. “I found one with Avonmore, who were opening a big cheese-making plant in Wales, so I went there as a accountant.”

Lenihan was soon on his travels again, however.

Avonmore bought a cheese factory in Paszto in 1992, and he arrived in Hungary on a six-month mission to establish financial systems for the plant. Eighteen years later, he is still here.

In 1994 Lenihan became general manager for the Hungarian business, then bought the operation with colleagues and venture capitalists in 1996 when Avonmore decided to leave the country.

They developed the company and two years later they sold it to Italian dairy outfit Sole, which by 2003-04 became the second- biggest dairy firm in Hungary, with turnover of about €200 million, according to Lenihan. He was general manager of the merged firm, which employed some 1,000 people and ran four factories around the country.

Sole then merged with Hungarian rival Mizo in 2005, shortly after which Lenihan left the company and joined Alfoldi Tej.

“It was set up in 2003 basically as a co-operative of dairy farmers and they sold milk in Hungary and abroad.

“When I joined, they had decided to get into processing and manufacturing and the main task was to transform milk into raw material and value-added, gain market share and develop our factory,” Lenihan says.

“It was a big challenge. We had lots of milk but no market. Now we do lots of ‘private label business’ for the likes of Spar and Tesco, and we have our own brands. The model is high volume, relatively small margins, high efficiency and low costs.

“We have the biggest dairy factory in Hungary, about 460 employees and produce 260 million kilos of milk a year.”

All but two of those employees are Hungarian, hardly a surprise in a country that is extremely protective of its agricultural sector and is ambivalent about foreign influence.

“Ours is a real Hungarian company,” Lenihan adds. “As a chartered accountant from Ireland, I suppose I come from an Anglo- Saxon business culture – focused, direct, ‘let’s do x, y and z by x date’.

“Hungarians have a different style of working. There is generally more discussion of topics and the decision-making process is probably longer because consultation and discussion are more extensive.”

An important element in Lenihan’s success in Hungary is his competence in its notoriously difficult language.

“The board of directors only speaks Hungarian, so I have to,” he says. “You’re too far from everything if you use a translator, it’s not practical. Of course I make mistakes, but my colleagues tolerate that.”

Lenihan says he also speaks somewhat rusty Irish and French, as well as some Arabic – the native tongue of his Sudanese wife with whom he has three children.

Hungary and most of its formerly communist neighbours are now in the European Union and are very different from the early 1990s, when businessmen could swiftly win and lose fortunes in the “wild east” during its transition to capitalism.

“There were more opportunities for foreigners back then, when it was harder to find locals with the right abilities and languages,” he reflects.

“Perhaps chances for junior people and fresh graduates are more limited here now, but there are always opportunities for enterprising people who know that time, effort and energy are required.”