Martin Murphy, managing director, HP Ireland
9th March 2010
it's time to build Irish multinationals.
It’s about self-belief. I think we’ve proven in the past that we are masters of the foreign direct investment (FDI) area, we’ve been very successful and have a great track record. I also think we’ve a great track record with what I’d call entrepreneurial start-ups and we’ve seen over the last decade a number of those go out onto the global stage and be very successful there.
We have to look at how we can build Irish multinationals that will create hundreds of jobs here in Ireland and that will go out and perform on the international stage. If you ask what are the top four or five Irish multinationals, they probably wouldn’t come to you as readily as what are the top US multinationals based here. That in itself is a good example of the fact that we need to grow this area.
How I think we will do that is we need to have a marriage of the best the FDI companies can bring in terms of management skills and capabilities with the best of what the entrepreneurial start-ups can offer.
We need to form a third space – apart from IDA and Enterprise Ireland – to create a new paradigm, something in the middle – a skill set that will show what are the best of those companies and foster and grow those Irish companies into multinationals.
There’s a good bit of work needed to get us into that space. We have to crack that and that’s the key to creating global Irish companies, located in Ireland but servicing international markets.
Martin Murphy's biography
Martin Murphy is managing director for Hewlett Packard (HP) Ireland and is responsible for driving HP’s business growth in the Irish market. In recent years, HP Ireland has achieved record growth and is now the largest IT and services provider in Ireland.
In June 2000, Murphy was appointed managing director of HP Ireland, having joined the company’s consulting organisation in 1986. In 1995, he was made sales director of the company in Ireland and presided over year-on-year double digit growth across all product lines North and South.
Since then, he has successfully steered the Irish operation through the Compaq merger, one of the largest in the history of the State, as well as other global acquisitions locally, including Electronic Data Systems, Mercury Interactive Corporation, Synstar and Schlumberger Business Continuity Services.
More recently, Murphy has been setting out the stall for HP as a key driver for innovation and job creation in the Irish economy.
In March 2009, HP created 500 new jobs in Leixlip as part of an €18-million investment in a multi-lingual support centre, followed in November with a further 50 jobs being created at HP’s Galway software development centre, which has been designated as a Centre of Expertise for Cloud Computing Services.
Murphy also sits on the board of the UCD Smurfit School and the Institute of Directors.
