Jerry Liston cannot help smiling. After 27 years of thinking profit margins and pharmaceuticals, he is about to embark on a new career which will consist of golf, weekend breaks at his holiday home in Connemara and achieving a long held ambition of learning how to sail properly.

Following his 60th birthday, Mr Liston will step down as chief executive of the Republic's largest drug distributor, United Drug, in September. Five-day working weeks and business breakfasts will soon be things of the past - and he says he has no regrets.

Under his stewardship the company has grown from a turnover of just £3 million (€3.81 million) in 1973 to a group turnover of close to £500 million (€635 million) in 1999 with pre-tax profits running at more than £11 million (€14 million) a year. United Drug has expanded from a couple of warehouses in Glasnevin to a purpose-built state-of-the-art headquarters in Tallaght. The company is now on the verge of buying 15 acres in Citywest to expand again.

However, when Mr Liston arrived things weren't looking so rosy. "Initially it was extremely competitive and there wasn't much growth. We were making very little profit and there was no room for error," he says. "There were attempts to knock us out of the market, so sheer survival was a challenge."

Mr Liston's major contribution to United Drug in the early years was the pursuit of a strategy to introduce computerisation, something few international drug distribution companies developed by the mid-1970s.

"Before that telephonists typed the names of products, sent paper dockets and there were random orders. It would often take two weeks for an invoice to reach customers after the goods had been delivered," says Mr Liston.

When the filing-cabinet sized computer arrived in 1976 it made a substantial difference to United Drug's operation and attracted interest among corporate Ireland. Representatives from Guinness dropped by to view the revolutionary machine, as did the current Taoiseach, Mr Bertie Ahern, who at that time was a financial manager at the Mater Hospital.

"We were looking for something that would make us different to other companies and we felt we could do this by giving our customers information to available products and providing instant invoices on delivery," says Mr Liston.

It worked. United Drug rapidly began challenging for the top spot in its market.

Being at the top echelons of business for almost three decades has given Mr Liston a bird's eye view of how economics has changed both in the Republic and internationally. And it was the 1990s which really stand apart, says Mr Liston.

"I think you have to look at the sheer scale of business in Ireland. I first went to work for the cigarette maker Carrolls which at the time was one of the top five companies in terms of market capitalisation with only £120 million," he says.

"It's a world of consolidation now and I think it's unfortunate that so much growth is done by acquisition rather than organic growth. We're always at risk of being acquired ourselves, any large company could say `we could grow that quicker than the market thinks it's worth'. I think that's sad."

However, United Drug has responded to the growing demand for greater economies of scale and has made several acquisitions under Mr Liston's tenure.

Probably the most significant coup of Mr Liston's career was the acquisition of Sangers in Northern Ireland in 1992 for £5.2 million after seeing off a major competitor. Sangers operates the group's drug wholesale distribution and Pemberton's business in Northern Ireland.

"I regard the working relationship between United Drug and Sangers as an absolute classic of how things should be. We absolutely and totally respect each other's individual ways of doing things," says Mr Liston. "We come together when it's important for things of common interest, but otherwise we run it as two separate entities and it runs exceedingly well."

Mr Liston believes the two companies are a perfect model for cross-Border co-operation. However, with the Sangers plant in Belfast located in the predominantly protestant Castlereagh Road, he does remember vividly the day he took a wrong turn in his southern registration car and came face to face with a gang wielding baseball bats.

"I was certainly in the wrong place at the wrong time," says Mr Liston. "I was told later if I'd have tried to do a u-turn instead of talking my way out of it I was a goner."

One of the most significant changes in recent years is the increasing importance of education to the Republic's economy, says Mr Liston.

"Graduates in the 1980s were only concerned about whether they could get to the US because companies like ours didn't have the opportunities here," says Mr Liston. When he joined the company in 1974 there were only three people with a third-level education working there, now there are more than 100. "I think our ability to attract graduates in Ireland over the past decade is the real change which has taken place," he says.

Mr Liston took a rather unorthodox route towards United Drug. Following on a family tradition - his father the late Kevin Liston was a barrister - Mr Liston studied law at Kings Inn where he mixed with many of the top legal minds in the Republic. "I would have been expected to go on and become a barrister but at the time there was a great sea change in Ireland with De Valera gone and Lemass in power," he says. "So I would have been the first of a generation of graduates who chose to go into business."

However, Mr Liston admits to not being a great risk taker by nature and not being particularly entrepreneurial. And this is one of the reasons he believes this is the correct time for him to step aside and enable Mr Liam FitzGerald, a director of United Drug and general manager of United Drug Distributors to take the reigns of power.

"Liam FitzGerald is an innovative man and will be very sensitive to the innovation opportunities."

The company is currently seeking acquisition opportunities in the UK and continental Europe and this, Mr Liston believes, will be the greatest challenge facing the incumbent chief executive.

Likewise, technological developments are driving further changes and United Drug is developing an Internet procurement strategy for hospitals. "I don't think pharmaceutical medicines will be sold over the Internet for legal reasons. But the business-to-business activity shows a lot of opportunity."

Any regrets?

"You have to face up to age you can't escape it," says Mr Liston. "Someone once told me if you retire at 60 you can enjoy yourself, do other things and continue with your life, if you retire at 62 1/2 you'll go home a couch potato and if you leave at 65 you drop dead in the car-park."

Mr Liston is keen to retire in style and is eagerly planning a rigorous golf schedule, more leisurely trips abroad and some involvement in the business administration side of the arts.

"It won't be easy to walk away from something I've done for 27 years, there will be a vacuum to fill. I'll miss the human contact and the fun I had at United Drug."