Michael Burke was just 23 when he set up a veterinarian practice in his local town, Loughrea. Entrepreneurial from the outset, he quickly spotted a gap in the market — supplying products to vets, many strewn across some of the more remote parts of the State.
As the business grew, so did his ambition. First, having developed a wholesale business in the east Galway town, he spotted the potential for business in the Middle East. On a first solo visit to Saudi Arabia, he returned home with a quarter of a million punts in orders for animal health products.
A couple of years later, he bought an old textile factory in the town and established his first in-house animal medicines manufacturing production line.
That has allowed him to largely self-finance a string of investments to enlarge the business over the years — most recently an €86 million programme announced in 2018 that, among other things, enabled the business to establish an FDA-approved lab to manufacture for the US market for the first time.
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Being self-funded, he says, gave the business and its managers “a great sense of security”. It has also meant employment in the business has grown to 730 people and when securing labour locally became a problem, especially on the research and development side of the business, Burke looked as far afield as India, the Philippines and Sri Lanka for staff. Today, there are people from 21 different countries working in his plants.
Looking back over the past 40 years, he says he has worked to make the business big enough to ensure that it remains in his hometown. Selling to a private equity buyer rather than someone in the trade only makes that more likely.
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Succession has been the one big question over the business in recent years. The sale for about €300 million now answers that question. Burke, now 76, says he will stay on with the business over the next six months as a consultant and then walk away content.
“The time is right. I’m ready for it. I won’t be coming back,” he said on Wednesday. “I think I have left a good team behind to drive it forward, with 80 new products in development in the veterinary side alone.”
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