On a humid Thursday in July in a warehouse in rural east Clare, a group of local and national politicians, Government officials and a smattering of reporters are waiting for the Irish man at the helm of Beckman Coulter to take the stage.
There are no half-measures here. The room, part of the California-headquartered medical diagnostics company’s sizeable campus, has been decked out professionally in the firm’s branding and all the bells and whistles associated with a big corporate event. In the background the audiovisual team are playing a background music playlist. It includes selections from Howard Shore’s score for The Lord of the Rings.
The choice is a fitting one for the local backdrop, perhaps one of the more unlikely locations to benefit from significant foreign direct investment in the State. Think of a high-tech research, development and manufacturing campus in the middle of JRR Tolkien’s Shire and you wouldn’t be far away from an accurate description of Beckman Coulter’s facility here – down a boreen, off a regional road in rural Clare, sitting on 120 hectares of farmland. The diagnostics company’s nearest neighbours are the cows grazing in adjacent fields.
The main event today is Kevin O’Reilly, who was named global president of Beckman Coulter last year. The company has its main base of operations in Brea, Orange County, California. O’Reilly is visiting the Irish site to unveil the details of a significant investment in the facility.
[ Diagnostics firm Beckman Coulter to invest €10m in Clare facilityOpens in new window ]
It has been a busy week for O’Reilly, who is on home soil for professional reasons for just the second time since taking the helm at Beckman Coulter. He arrived from the UK the previous Saturday, and spent the weekend with his family in Dublin before driving to Clare on the Monday.
“I like to come to Ireland as often as I can,” he tells The Irish Times after the presentation to the group of visitors. “My mom is getting on, as you can imagine, and I have a brother and two sisters still here. So lots of family, lots of cousins. We try to get home as often as we can but now there’s a bit of a professional component to it as well as a private one.”
Private would be a fair descriptor for Danaher, the New York-listed diagnostics group in which Beckman Coulter operates; impressive, given the group’s status within the industry and a behemoth with $24 billion in annual revenues.
Beckman Coulter itself has had a presence in the Republic for decades, acquiring the Clare site – formerly the Olympus camera factory – in 2009, far from the madding crowd.
A bit like Willy Wonka opening the gates of the chocolate factory to outsiders for the first time, the open day in Clare is a bit of a surprise. It raises the question: why now?
The simple answer is the company has plenty to talk about these days. Beckman Coulter, which employs 11,000 people globally, recently invested €10 million in its Irish operation, unveiling plans to increase staffing levels by about 80 to more than 630 or so over the coming years. About 50 of these positions are open roles for which the company is actively hiring. It expects to hire for another 30 or so between 2025 and 2027.
In 2022 Beckman Coulter Ireland Inc, a private unlimited company that serves as the main holding company for its Irish operations, turned a €14 million profit on revenues of close to €207 million, according to its most recently available set of accounts. Not huge for a company that generates $4 billion in annual revenues but healthy nonetheless.
O’Reilly agrees that Danaher and its constituent companies have typically maintained a low profile. While that seems unlikely to change wholesale, he thinks both the group and the company have a narrative that’s worth shouting about from time to time.
“We [at Danaher] have historically maintained our brands independently,” says O’Reilly. “But we also think now there’s a power to showing people what we can do as a combined entity and how we can work together. So, there’s a little bit more understanding of the impact of telling our story.”
In Beckman Coulter’s case, that story is a fascinating one. The potted version is this: the Beckman on the masthead refers to Arnold Beckman, the California Institute of Technology professor who invented the pH meter and helped put the silicon in Silicon Valley when he cofounded the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, in 1955 as a division of his eponymous scientific device company. The firm eventually merged with SmithKline before acquiring Coulter Corporation in 1998, and was finally snapped up by Danaher in 2011.
In the meantime, Beckman Coulter had acquired the Clare site in 2009 as part of its takeover of Japanese optics and camera-maker Olympus Corporation’s diagnostics business. Chemistry and immunoassay – technology used to measure the presence of a particular molecule in a sample of bodily fluid – are two cornerstones of the business. Automating those processes is another.
Most of these functions are “well represented” at the site in Clare, O’Reilly tells his audience. “Our chemistry is heavily centred here in Ireland,” he says. “Immunoassay is also represented here and really some of the most important work that we’re doing on bloodborne viruses.”
Here, the company also manufactures much of the reagent lines used in the estimated one million blood tests conducted every hour globally using Beckman Coulter’s instruments. A tour of the facility includes a stop-off in one of the laboratories where some of its automated blood banking machines – which the company makes itself in Asia – can process a staggering 2,000-8,000 tests an hour.
The lab is staffed by a mix of seasoned professionals and youthful graduates, many of them from the University of Limerick. “It’s the cutting edge of science,” says O’Reilly. “And here we are in rural Clare. The ability to access that talent is really impressive.”
This is another factor the company is trying to highlight today: its impact on the locality and its population.
An economic impact study commissioned by Beckman Coulter and conducted by Repucon, claims the company added €55 million to the regional economy through salaries, contracts and other payments in 2022. Some €22 million of that figure was through its employment of 220 people living in Co Clare. Of the roughly 550 people working there, some 63 per cent have college degrees, says vice-president for EMEA operations Orlaith Lawler, unusually high for what is at heart a manufacturing site.
There is plenty of spin about Ireland’s attractiveness as a destination for foreign direct investment. But if O’Reilly and his colleagues are exaggerating about Beckman Coulter’s reasons for wanting to expand its operations here, it certainly doesn’t come across in the conversation.
“There’s all the usual advantages of Ireland for an American multinational,” he says. “You know, it’s a western country; similar system of laws; very business-friendly environment; support from the government; and then it’s quite open-minded about a lot of things.”
One thing that stands out above all else, he says, is the quality of the workforce. “I think that success breeds success. Our team here has been very successful in delivering on their goals, exceeding their goals and that just kind of encourages us to continue to invest ... So we keep coming back.”
We’ve delivered what I would say are state-of-the-art environmental responses to be able to operate in this kind of idyllic farming environment
Questions abound about Ireland’s ability to continue to attract FDI against the backdrop of long-term infrastructural challenges with energy and issues of competitiveness and cost. There is also the small matter of climate targets and the natural tension between substantively addressing them while also clinging to ambitions of perpetual economic growth. As locations go, rural Ireland is a crucible for many of these conflicting priorities, some of which Beckman Coulter is attempting to address directly.
Of course, any manufacturing facility will have an impact on local ecology and here in east Clare it is no different. But the company is at pains to mitigate if not obviate the effect of what economists euphemistically describe as the “negative externalities” associated with its activities on the particularly charming part of the country in which it sits. Beckman Coulter uses wood chips chopped from trees within the confines of its huge site to fuel the biomass burners with which it heats the facility.
The company has also installed a wastewater treatment facility that it says cleans run-off used in its processes before letting it back out into local streams, which it tests and monitors continuously. Vermicomposting – the use of worms to digest and transform effluent into nutrient-rich compost – is another solution on display at the facility during the tour, which also includes a quick look at the facility’s hives, home to about 240,000 bees.
“It has its challenges,” says O’Reilly. “But we’ve solved those challenges. If you look around the site, you’ll see we’ve delivered what I would say are state-of-the-art environmental responses to be able to operate in this kind of idyllic farming environment.”
Could Beckman Coulter’s operations here provide a blueprint for other companies operating in rural settings? “I think it’s definitely replicable,” he says,” but I wouldn’t say it’s easy. It’s kind of trite but the journey of 1,000 miles starts with one step, and then you take another step and another step. Can others do it? Yes, categorically. Are there faster paths to it? There might be but this worked for us. And we’re very proud of it.”
In the meantime, O’Reilly is adjusting to life as perhaps the most senior Irish executive in medical diagnostics globally, an appellation he’s not particularly keen to entertain. “I’ve never thought about that,” he says, laughing it off. “I’m aware of huge numbers of very, very successful Irish executives in California and Silicon Valley.”
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