Irish chase Lyon share of French business

It is 7.15 at the Gare de Lyon on a dark and frozen Paris morning. Most of the members of the two-dozen-strong Irish trade mission to Lyon are hunched in their coats, their communications skills reduced to sleepy nods and monosyllabic greetings. Not Robert Doyle.

The 30-year-old sales director for Advanced Materials (AM) Ltd of Naas, Co Kildare, rereads two faxes that he sent before coming to the station. He makes business calls on his mobile telephone - whom he can be calling at this hour is a mystery. Mr Doyle appears eager, aggressive, and despite the smooth manners, one suspects, a bit ruthless.

When Advanced Materials' US parent company set up shop in Ireland at the beginning of this year they poached Mr Doyle and two other managers from the Smurfit group. AM began producing foams, foils, films, adhesive composites and polymers in June and is already supplying 3M, Foamex, Alveo and 16 other companies.

"What you're seeing now is the second tranche of US companies coming into Ireland," Mr Doyle explains. Although the other companies on the Lyon trip are Irish-owned, they too are described as second tranche, satellite, secondary suppliers and service industries.

"The large OEMs [Original Equipment Manufacturers] like Hewlett-Packard and Renault come first," Mr Doyle explains. "They want local suppliers, so the service industries follow. Large US companies would look to the same suppliers they have in the US. They say `We are in Europe now. Why don't you come and look after us?' "

The Paris office of Enterprise Ireland (created last summer by the fusion of the Irish Trade Board, Forbairt and the training division of FAS) has set up appointments for Mr Doyle with a French maker of prosthetics who buys sterile foam packaging for artificial body parts and a trampoline manufacturer who needs protective foam for his contraptions.

Mr Doyle tries to convince the prosthetics company that his "thermo-formed" foam would prevent breakage that occurs with flat foam packing. "He's driving a Toyota Corolla; I'm trying to sell him a Lexus," Mr Doyle says with the aplomb of a car salesman. He leaves the meeting carrying an artificial knee and a request for a price quote on a thermo-formed part - the best he could hope for from an initial contact.

Bringing Irish and French business people together is second nature to Mr Jim Maguire, the director of the 12-strong Paris office of Enterprise Ireland, and Mrs Veronica Comyn, the secretary general of the Chambre de Commerce Franco-Irlandaise. Mr Maguire's staff mobilised the foot soldiers of this Irish foray into the French business world, while Mrs Comyn organised the ceremonial and representational side of the trip (so important in France) through contacts with the Lyon Chamber of Commerce.

French chambers of commerce are powerful institutions that bear little resemblance to the business clubs in English-speaking countries, Mrs Comyn explains. "Napoleon defined what a chamber of commerce is and should do," she says. Every company in France pays a levy to their local chamber. Large chambers run business schools and own infrastructure including airports and trade fair grounds. The Lyon Chamber, for example, groups 51,000 companies and has an annual budget of Ffr747 million (£89 million).

Lyon built its reputation for solid bourgeois wealth and values on the silk weaving industry and the finest French cuisine. But today the Lyon region, like Ireland, has a high concentration of small and medium-sized industries, especially in information technology and medical and pharmaceuticals. France's second largest city has an economy twice the size of Ireland's and is a hub for trade with southern Europe and Switzerland.

This is the third Irish trade mission Mr Maguire has organised this year but this time he teamed up with Mrs Comyn "because in France, the chamber of commerce is a concept that is highly credible". The Irish Embassy in Paris sent Ambassador Patrick O'Connor, Mrs Patricia O'Connor and Mr Brendan MacNamara, the first secretary for economic affairs, to bolster the delegation. "The scatter-shot trade shows are over," Mr MacNamara says. "These days we're into matchmaking." A French group from Lyon will visit Ireland in March. And because the Cork and Rennes areas have a concentration of electronics industries in common, they too will host exchange visits.

The most common French misapprehension, Mr Maguire says, "is that Ireland is a lot further away than it is". A second mistake, cited by several business people on the trip, is the belief that Ireland is a source of cheap labour; the Taiwan of Europe.

Mr Maguire has had six years in Paris to observe the French way of doing business. "The meeting culture is totally different here," he says. "Meetings are harder to set up, and they take much longer. The second difference is decision making. People may have the title of buyer but they don't have the authority to decide on their own; many more people feed into the decision process. One consequence is that it takes longer to do business here. You have to think on a different time scale. In Britain or Holland it takes about a year to do serious business. Here it takes about a year and a half."

Another difference, Mr Maguire says, is the amount of information people want. In France it is important to provide details in advance, which is why his office has already sent ahead brochures and French-language profiles of the four Irish companies on the trade mission: Advanced Materials, Steripack Medical and Adam Spence, QUMAS and Biological Laboratories.

"I've been to meetings where they discussed the price of electricity per kilowatt, interest rates, social security arrangements and every imaginable detail of machinery," Mr Maguire continues. "The advantage is that once you are doing business in France, it is pretty secure, because pulling out is so complicated."

Despite the fastidiousness of French customers, Mr Maguire says the French market is too big to ignore. France is the world's fourth largest economy - it is one third larger than Britain's for the same number of people. Its top 10 companies have a turnover at least five times the size of the Irish economy. And the return of a Socialist government in 1997, with measures such as the 35-hour working week, is a boon to would-be foreign suppliers.

"Because labour restrictions and social security costs are so high for employers," Mr Maguire says, "it has spawned a huge subcontracting economy that is estimated at Ffr40 billion". Ireland has more than doubled its share of the French import market in the past decade, selling Ffr24 billion worth of products to France last year

The Salles des Seances in the city-block-sized, 19th century Lyon Chamber of Commerce building looks like it could collapse under the weight of so much gold leaf. Under the stern gaze of Mr Jacquard, the Dickensian-era inventor of a special weaving loom, the Irish guests and their French hosts trade compliments.

"Ireland may not be the biggest country in Europe but you are certainly the most dynamic," the President of the Lyon Chamber, Mr Guy Malher says. Mr Charles Campbell, the President of the Chambre de Commerce Franco-Irlandaise indulges Lyon's second city complex. "Your beautiful city has nothing to envy in Paris," he says. Mr Alain Galliano, the economic and commercial counsellor from the French Embassy in Dublin, urges local businessmen to invest in Ireland with such fervour that one wonders which government he really works for.

While most of the delegation settle down for lunch in the Salle des Portraits, some slip away to appointments. I join Ms Mary Minnock (32), the representative in France for Steripack Medical and Adam Spence, and Tom Cusack (26), the pharmaceutical and medical sector marketing adviser for Enterprise Ireland. We grab sandwiches at the Gare PartDieu, rent a car and set out through the snowy countryside for Bourg-en Bresse, 61 km north of Lyon.

Ms Minnock studied at the College of Marketing and Design and earned an MBA from Trinity, then worked for ICI until she began representing Irish companies in France this year. "Ireland is so small that Irish companies very quickly get to the point where they need to expand abroad," she says. "If a company has 50 to 60 employees and a turnover of £3 million, they need to export but probably don't have the resources to set up an office themselves in France. The companies I represent each had close to 100 contacts in France before but it didn't come to anything. The French focus on those close to them who are constantly in touch. This is a major stumbling block for Irish companies trying to penetrate French markets."

The companies Ms Minnock works for share her costs and she proposes a marketing plan after six months. "Then we sit down together and decide to what extent they are ready to commit to this market. We put the plan into action with the idea that at the end, they will commit someone to France and I will pass it over to them. My strength is in investigating and understanding the market."

She uses the library and contacts which Enterprise Ireland puts at the disposal of Irish businesses. "We pay enough for it as taxpayers and as Irish companies," she says. "You can't expect Enterprise Ireland to do your work for you, but you should be demanding." At Rusch Medical in Bourg-enBresse, Mr Frederic Jouannel greets us with the question, "Which Ireland are you from?" His company, which makes disposable leggo kit-style medical tubes, breathing filters and oxygen masks, has plants in Lurgan and Coleraine, and he has a distributor in the Republic. Ms Minnock hopes to interest him in sterile packaging for his wares.

His present supplier is good but too expensive, he says. Can Steripack provide the same packaging more cheaply? "We are well-placed to do special orders - not poor quality, big runs at low prices," she answers.

Rusch's buyer, Mr Thierry Bieler, joins us in the windowless company canteen with its formica table and fluorescent ceiling lights. He buys 30,000 sterile packages a month from SPS, the biggest supplier in France. Are all the packages standard?

Ms Minnock asks. "Yes," he replies. "We are good for everything that has to be custom made, in small quantities," she continues. "We might be interested," Mr Bieler answers. He promises to send her samples of equipment for which he needs packaging in about two weeks.

In the evening, the trade delegation meets again at La Mere Brazier restaurant, which has been run by women from the Brazier family for three generations. It is a fitting venue, since two of the four companies on the trip are represented by Irish women. A third Irish woman, Ms Claire Tobin, (28), the Lyon-based French sales director for the Dublin company Biotrin, joins us at the restaurant. It took Ms Tobin, a graduate in international commerce from University College Cork, only 4 1/2 years to corner the French market for medical diagnostic kits for viruses and parasites and post-liver transplants - in a sector dominated by men who are 10 to 15 years her senior.

Five people work in Ms Tobin's Lyon office and Biotrin employs six people in its German sales office. Together these two countries account for 55 per cent of the company's £3.5 million in annual sales. "Since the discovery of HIV, people are much more attuned to the need for diagnostic tests," Ms Tobin says. She encounters very little competition. "We produce something they don't," she says. "We decided to produce niche diagnostics. Our markets are too small for the big diagnostic companies to want to compete with us, simply because these markets aren't worthwhile for them."