Philip O’Doherty briefs US business delegation on remarkable journey from DuPont to E+I/Vertiv
Philip O’Doherty has outlined how his time as an electrical engineer at DuPont was a key milestone in a career that saw the firm he founded sold to Vertiv for $2billion in 2021.
The E+I Engineering founder was guest speaker at an AwakenHub event on the benefits of expanding into the US in Derry.
One of Ireland's most successful ever businessmen, Mr. O'Doherty honed his skills at DuPont - for years Derry's most famous foreign direct investor.
He set up Electrical and Instrumentation (E+I) Engineering in the late 80s and ultimately ended up becoming an inward investor himself into Ras Al-Khaimah, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Anderson County, South Carolina, before the company was bought by the Ohio-based Vertiv, formerly Emerson Network Power, five years ago.
Raised in Oakfield off Beechwood Avenue in the lower Creggan area and educated at St. Columb’s College, Mr. O’Doherty studied electrical and electronic engineering at Queen’s, ignoring the suggestion of Fr. James Coulter, President of ‘the College at the time, that he should become a doctor.
He told a reception attended by the Mayor Ruairí McHugh, US Consul General to NI James Applegate, delegates from Ohio, including Derry man Mark Owens, and Stephen Lindsay, President of Derry Chamber, how he had decided to specialise in high voltage power engineering as opposed to low voltage electronics. It was a fateful decision.
"For years I thought I had made a mistake. There was all this stuff, silicon chips, technology, Motorola, Intel...why did I not focus on the electronic side?
"I did a bit of both but over the past 20 years with data centres - everybody needs power engineers so we are all geniuses now no matter how bad you were. There is a global shortage.
"The US is doing better than most because of the size of the grids but there is a lot of people from Indian, a lot of people from China, there is a lot of graduates from those particular disciplines that are providing a lot of help to the US to expand their grids for Artificial Intelligence (AI) particularly,” he reflected.
After graduating the 65-year-old worked as an engineer with the Irish grid provider ESB in Letterkenny and Sligo before joining DuPont.
The Delaware-headquartered chemical and plastics manufacturer was Derry’s first major US investor that opened its first European plant in Maydown in 1960, the year Mr. O’Doherty was born.
“The training at DuPont was fabulous,” he acknowledged.
He said it gave him a practical grounding in the design and implementation of critical power systems.
These are essential for must-not-fail plants like DuPont. They are vital too for powerplants, data centres and other facilities that use lots of electricity.
“I was working hands on every day at DuPont. I was designing switch gear, buying switchgear, commissioning switchgear. So I was implementing what I learned at university.
"A lot of what DuPont taught they call critical power which basically means they don't like power going off and that's what data centres need as well so the technology and the architecture for the power systems are very much the same.
"I always felt DuPont were 20 years ahead of Google and Facebook because what we do now is not much different. Obviously there is better technology but it is the same philosophy.”
Partly driven by entrepreneurial spirit and also cognisant that he was an electrical engineer at a chemical company he left DuPont after four years and founded E+I in 1987.
He started off in the London market at a time when electronic trading was taking off in stock markets.
"That required huge amounts of power and cooling,” he said.
E+I grew into a leading supplier of essential equipment for handling high current systems such as switchgear and electrical bus bars.
Mr. O’Doherty’s time at DuPont meant he was versed in the standards and requirements of both US and European customers.
There was also a large pool of skilled workers in Derry and Donegal.
“We do have a lot of skilled people. Traditionally DuPont were educating electrical and mechanical instrumentation, hydraulic experts. They were going all over the world because of the reputation DuPont had for safety.
"What I was flabbergasted about with DuPont was that they had a standard for everything. They had a standard for a piece of paper, for a nut, a bolt, a washer, a circuit-breaker, a transformer,” he recalled.
From its Burnfoot headquarters, E+I became a global player. It built Powerbar Gulf LLC factory at Ras-al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates in 2007.
"We were expanding because we thought the products we had were the best products on the market. We benchmarked against Siemens, ABB and Schneider Electric and we basically decided we need to start marking these elsewhere.
"You can't have two or three factories in Ireland to supply Europe and supply the world.
"Initially, we targeted UAE. Dubai was going through a building boom with all these high rise buildings with huge amounts of electrical switchgear and electrical bus bar flows in those high rise buildings.
"One big advantage was that there was no competition. There was no other manufacturing plant,” he explained.
Powerbar became the leading manufacturer of switchgear in the Gulf.
In 2014 thirty-one years after starting at DuPont Mr. O’Doherty became an investor in America when E+I built a $17m facility in Anderson County, South Carolina.
This was both in order to scale the business and to be close to where his customers were. One of these was Google.
Mr. O’Doherty explained that prior to this E+I had been working on a job in Amsterdam for a US end client.
He met an Irish engineer who was working for the company. Some time later he got a call from him saying he had joined the search engine, advertising and cloud computing giant and that he wanted to bring a deputation to Burnfoot.
“What are we doing to tell these guys and why are they coming to see us?” he wondered at the time.
"He knew what we had. Maybe we didn't think it was as good as it was but it turned out to be exactly what they were looking for. They were looking for people who were reactive, who were flexible, who could give them exactly what they want. If you say it is going to be 12 weeks, make sure it is 12 weeks. Maybe the corporates think Google is just another customer. They were our main customer very quickly.
"Why would Google want a small Irish company in Donegal? Basically because of the people and the people they interacted with. We were engineers and basically the people that run these data centres are engineers. They are not management people. They are not marketing people.”
South Carolina became the preferred location for E+I’s first plant in the US by happy accident.
A delegation from the State were in Ireland to talk about how they were trying to moving away from old industries like tobacco and textiles that were being offshored in order to concentrate on high value advanced manufacturing.
He was impressed by the scale of a BMW manufacturing plant in Greer, South Carolina, that provides employment for up to 25,000 directly and indirectly.
“You can't land something like that straight away. You have to have all the infrastructure in place. It took them years to get the colleges together, get the universities together to do the right courses,” he said, adding that Clemson University, the local college, provided a good pipeline of graduates for the workforce there.
He also recognised in Anderson County a similar ethos of his home town.
"We have good quality of work ethic and it seemed very much when I went to the US, by luck or by judgement, South Carolina was the very same with a blue collar workforce which was really what I was looking for,” he added.
The $2billion acquisition of E+I and Powerbar by Vertiv in 2021 came about at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
"During COVID we realised the world can’t stop. Everybody was on WhatsApp, they were on Teams calls, our main customers were using these data centres to run their apps. They couldn't shut down.
"We paid a lot of our maintenance guys, service team and back-up team to base themselves on these [data centre] sites and we bumped into these guys from Vertiv,” he said.
E+I were making electrical switchgear and bus bars. Vertiv specialised in Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems, back-up power supplies and thermal cooling systems.
All of these are necessary for data centres and were being sold into the same market so the deal made sense.
Mr. O’Doherty noted that investing in America had reaped dividends for E+I in Donegal and Derry.
"Our companies have to scale. What we found is we got a lot more business in Europe and Ireland and the UK because we are a global supplier.
"There were people coming over and saying, ‘We heard about you guys because you have a factory in South Carolina and you work with Google and Microsoft. We have a project in Bulgaria, can have a look at it?’ They knew we had a track record.”
That’s resulted in thousands of jobs in Derry, Burnfoot and Letterkenny.
Speaking to the ‘Journal’ after his address Mr. O’Doherty reflected: “The legacy I’m leaving behind is that there are over 2,500 in great facilities here. It's really important to me.”