New HortResearch chief has wide view

By SIMON COLLINS science reporter

A top dairy industry executive is to head HortResearch, which is moving its head office to Auckland in a bid to hook into global markets.

New chief executive Paul McGilvary, 45, was managing director for Europe of Fonterra's value-added dairy ingredients company, NZMP.

He will start at HortResearch's present head office in Palmerston North on August 19, but plans to move to the institute's Mt Albert research centre as soon as possible.

"Given the international orientation of the business, I think it's appropriate that I am in Auckland rather than Palmerston North," he said.

He is the second expatriate Kiwi businessman to take over one of the top four crown research institutes this year, following former Unilever executive Nigel Kirkpatrick at Industrial Research Ltd (IRL).

HortResearch has been the least commercial of the top four, with 64 per cent of its revenue in the year to June last year still coming from core Government contracts.

Unlike IRL and AgResearch, it did not put up any proposals under a new Government scheme to fund industry/research consortiums.

Partly as a result, it lost finance in its key growth field of biotechnology, and has just had to make 41 of its 500 staff redundant.

However, outgoing chief executive Dr Ian Warrington said last month that his board had approved three new joint ventures.

One has since been announced - a venture with Christchurch biotech company Enzo Nutraceuticals to extract drugs from the bark of pine trees to alleviate the side-effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

HortResearch spokeswoman Liz Brook said the second venture was "very close to being announced" and the third was still waiting on a final sign-off by the commercial partner.

McGilvary said he was attracted to HortResearch by the huge potential of biotech for New Zealand.

"The crown research institutes have some pretty good functions which are quite important, but equally as part of the knowledge wave developments in New Zealand they are well placed to add value to the country," he said.

"I think my background - the relationships, the customer focus - are useful things to be brought to Hort. I can already understand why some of those skills can be leveraged in that business."

McGilvary graduated with honours in economics from Victoria University in 1979, then worked as a financial analyst for Toyota in Wellington.

He worked in a chain of petrol stations owned by his father-in-law from 1981-84, helped to set up what is now the Opus International consulting business for WorksCorp, and joined the Dairy Board as its manager for Australia in 1992.

From 1995 McGilvary worked for the Dairy Board in Europe, running NZMP's European business from 1999.

He has been back in Wellington for the past few months working on Fonterra's strategic plan.