ENTREPRENEUR OF the Year Liam Casey, who heads up the supply chain management company PCH International, is in Monte Carlo today to represent Ireland in the Ernst Young World Entrepreneur of the Year Awards. Award winners from 40 countries will compete for the world title.
PCH, which Mr Casey founded in 1996, sources low-priced components in China for some of the world’s biggest IT and telecoms companies and has doubled in size each year for the past three years. The Corkman, who lives out of a suitcase and whose company’s business is focused on the southern Chinese boomtown of Shenzhen, was surprised, and very pleased, to win the Irish award. However, he was philosophical on what the kudos means. For him, PCH’s success is all the recognition he needs.
It’s been a busy year since he won the Irish title but he will inevitably be thinking two or three projects ahead during the awards ceremony. He is not a school-taught manager, and has no magic formula for what has made PCH a success, but he believes in sixth sense, hands-on management and attention to detail when it comes to his staff.
PCH, which stands for Pacific Coast Highway in reference to where Mr Casey lived for a year prior to establishing the company, has 800 employees working in offices in the US, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Brazil. In 2007 the company had revenues of $120 million (€77 million). This year, he forecasts sales of more than $180 million.
Among the products it provides, PCH makes accessories for MP3s, high-end headphones and soft goods. It also manufactures packaging and components for some of the world’s biggest brands, including three of the top five PC manufacturers and a raft of blue-chip consumer electronics and telecommunications companies, as well as medical supplies companies and other high-tech firms.
A recent addition to the group’s offerings is web store management and order fulfilment, where consumers can go online and order a product from one of PCH’s client’s web store. PCH fulfils the product from their logistics centre in Shenzhen and can reach a consumer’s door anywhere in the US in three days, sometimes less.
The majority of PCH’s clients are based in the US and some of the biggest are in Japan, though Mr Casey jealously guards the identity of his clients, at their request.
It’s a long way from managing Club Tricot for Kevin Kelleher on Grafton Street in the early 1990s. He left the rag trade for the electronics business midway through that decade and gained experience in electronics in the US before coming back to Ireland, where he set up PCH in Cork.
His first exposure to Asia was Taiwan, followed by China, in 1996, trying to source components. Mr Casey attributes a big part of his success to the fact he had next to no money when he started out. Industry watchers, including leading US academics studying supply chain management, believe his management style has been central to his success. But the company is growing and this means expanding the management tier. At the beginning of this year PCH introduced a high profile management team as part of its growth strategy.
“PCH started with an airline ticket, not a business plan. I think it’s probably fair to say we’ve made every mistake in the book along the way. Mistakes are, and have been, very important to the development of this company,” he said.
“One area where things could have been done differently is on institutional investment. We’re looking at this area now. We’re a 12-year-old company and we’ve never brought in big institutional money before. The biggest mistake maybe is that I didn’t bring a small amount of institutional equity earlier on, so we would have been on the list with a track record. But then who is to know – maybe if we had gotten institutional money then, they wouldn’t have allowed us to make the mistakes that we needed to make to develop. So it’s hard to know.”
