Murphy moves on richer

It's been a good week for Gerry Murphy, the former Greencore chief executive who has just negotiated the merger of his NFC logistics group with the Ocean freight business in a £3.2 billion sterling (€5.1 billion) deal.

Murphy might be giving up the chief executive's job to Ocean boss John Allan, but talk in the market is that he is departing with £1.5 million sterling in his pocket apart altogether from the value of his NFC shares.

After a successful early career with Grand Metropolitan, Greencore chairman Bernie Cahill nine years ago brought Murphy to Greencore as its new chief executive. Cahill saw the Kilkennyman as the ideal chief executive to drive Greencore, following the Talmino debacle.

There were great expectations that his arrival o would be the catalyst for an aggressive expansion programme by Greencore. But the reality was that the Murphy tenure at Greencore did not include any great strategic shift away from the group's core businesses in sugar, fertiliser, flour and other bulk agricultural products.

Murphy always argued that he wasn't going to be rushed into big acquisitions simply for the sake of being seen to be doing something. But the reaction of some investors was that he was excessively cautious. The Greencore core businesses, run by the then chief operating officer David Dilger, continued to churn out cash flow and profits but where were the longer-term strategic moves?

After a few years at Greencore, NFC came waving a chequebook and Murphy moved back to the UK to try to revitalise the former employee-owned transport group which had lost its way. It's probably fair to say that Murphy has been more successful at NFC than he was at Greencore - the British transport company was slimmed down, loss-making removals bits were sold off and the company ended up as a pure logistics company and in immeasurably better shape. This led to the merger this week with Ocean.

Even though this merger was on a roughly 50-50 basis, it was Murphy who decided to step aside. The question now is where he will surface next. At the age of 44, Murphy is still young enough to aspire to another chief executive's jobs.