Murphy's law
Alan Murphy is one of the most respected industrialists the north has produced. Now nearing 60 and living in Monaco, he's still very much on the ball, as Neil Tague discovers
It's a busier retirement than most people have. Within moments of meeting Alan Murphy he's thrust a pile of documents into my arms outlining what he's done and what he's doing. He's out of the paper business that netted him most of an estimated £3200m fortune, but there are current interests in property, shipping, private equity and art. Sounds like a full-time job.
"I wouldn't consider myself to be at work anything like full time," he frowns. "I'm busy enough though. Maybe two days a week on average. But it's mostly communication. With technology it's so easy to keep on top of things now."
We're lunching at the Lowry Hotel, a regular haunt of Murphy's when he's back in the North West. The following day, he's off to London for lunch with his daughter, the actress Davina Murphy. After that it's back home to Monaco, from where he'll pop down to Cannes for a series of meetings over the three-day bunfight that is MIPIM, the property industry's annual get-together in the sun. "Not all my weeks are like this," he grins.
A few facts first. Bootle-born Alan George Murphy started his working life in 1966 at Pergamon Press, progressing quickly through the sales ranks to become manager of the company's new Irish division in 1968. "Invaluable experience as it gave me the opportunity to establish a sales team with total responsibility for company marketing and administration control," he says.
After a move to Carnation Foods, Murphy spent seven years with Gillette, where he was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. First came a small chain of Lancashire hair salons, then a supermarket in Liverpool called Champion Discount. By the early 1980s the opening - an offer to market a new toilet paper - that would one day make him one of the North West's super-rich was just around the corner.
Once the salons and supermarkets were sold Murphy concentrated his resources purely on his new business, AM Paper Converters, which converted recycled tissue into toilet paper. Set up in Skelmersdale in 1983 it was, says Murphy, a £31m-turnover business that supplied market traders, small super-markets and cash and carries. He invested heavily, moving the company to larger premises with newer machinery in 1984.
"New ideas have always been central to my approach. We can all of us retune a business and make it work a bit more efficiently. But what interests me is the need to be a bit different, to gain an advantage. With AM there was a big risk factor every time we branched into a new area," he says.
"Every time we were the first in the UK to do what we were doing. Like when we introduced the Through Air Dried (TAD) technology - only Procter & Gamble had done that. It was a massive, massive risk that we were going to do with or without HSBC's backing. The story of AM was 16 or 17 years' worth of calculated risk-taking to get to where we did."
AM was a serial innovator. In 1985 it commissioned the first fully automated kitchen towel line. In 1988 AM introduced facial tissue to its range and a year later was the first company to install a four-colour tissue printer. In 1990 it bought a loss-making mill in Derbyshire, made it a profit centre within six months and spent £39m on a rebuild that won an environmental award.
By 1997 AM had grown into one of the region's outstanding industrial successes, employing over 600 people. It was a key player in own label tissues as supermarkets got bigger and bigger.
It had also kept investing in property, allowing the addition of new technologies, such as the TAD technology that made the company so attractive when Murphy decided enough was enough. He sold 70 per cent of the business to HSBC for £3145m. After a couple of years as a non-executive director, he sold his remaining 30 per cent stake and left for Monaco. Any chance of a return to UK domicile?
"Monaco's a great place to be for business people and it suits the way I live my life. A lot of people there are still quite hands-on with business," he says.
Had our interview taken place a few weeks earlier, the subject of Liverpool FC may have been touchy. As a keen Reds supporter, has he been approached by any of the various consortia who've had a stab at buying the club? "It's been mentioned. I did at one time consider it, but I'm not saying which bid it was. Liverpool look to have got themselves a good deal with the Americans," he says.
As he hasn't made it to a game since the European Cup final in Istanbul in 2005, other pastimes have come to the fore, art being one. "I wouldn't say I'm an art expert, but I believe I'm the biggest owner of Vietnamese art in the world," he says. He is working with the Witness Collection, which over five years has tallied up over 1,000 pieces of authenticated Vietnamese art.
Then there's the yacht, which offers a glimpse into the Murphy mindset - to enjoy the trappings of wealth, but not be wasteful. "I have a super-yacht and enjoy sailing around the Mediterranean," he says. "But I run it as a small charter business and hope to cover the operating costs over the course of each year."
Boats of an altogether more serious scale are beginning to occupy more of Murphy's time. He's a founding investor in Horizon Global Shipping Fund, a Jersey-based fund that has started building oil tankers in China. The first one will be ready in March 2008. Something of a diversification?
"In a way yes," he says. "It is a first for me. But I think there's a lot of potential in shipping and it will offer good returns. Once the first ship is built there will be one finished every three months on a rolling programme."
Again, being different is the key: "We're speaking directly with the major companies and we think there are one or two specialist niche areas that we can become serious players in. It could be massive." The fund is fully subscribed, mostly from Monaco-based colleagues.
Another project is with Aquarius Equity Partners, headed by renowned dealmaker Steve Sealey, a fellow Liverpudlian and formerly a Murphy lieutenant at AM. Aquarius currently has under management the Northwest Regional Development Agency and DTI-backed North West Seed Fund for early- stage businesses, but Sealey is currently pulling together high net worth individuals to back a fund that will take an entrepreneurial approach to equity gap funding. Murphy is at the forefront.
"Again, it's a bit of a diversification," he says. "There are all sorts of funds I can get involved in. But I've got a lot of confidence in Steve, he's proved at AM that he's very capable."
It's fairly common for those who've made their pile to invest in property and Murphy is no exception. "When I first moved out to Monaco I felt I had to do something to keep busy," he says. "I set up a clothing business with a very good designer. It did OK, but it wasn't really for me. The property business I set up, Marplace, was more interesting."
Through Coutts, the private bank, Murphy met Nick Payne, who, after developing Manchester's Deansgate Locks leisure scheme with Westport, was looking for a new direction. Payne bought a 30 per cent stake in a business rebranded as Nikal, which was launched in January 2003. Despite criticism, Murphy says he's happy with progress.
"I was looking for a property professional I wanted to work with. I saw Deansgate Locks and how it had transformed that area and thought: "There's someone with a vision.' I like to work with strong, entrepreneurial characters and Nikal's going well," he says.
Nikal schemes underway include the £3300m Masshouse in Birmingham, Bengal Mill in Manchester and a serviced office project in Altrincham called Buro, while it has bought Mynshall House in Hanging Ditch for its own offices, along with some apartments and further office space.
"Mynshall House is big for us, it's a great site. It's the final part of the jigsaw for the part of Manchester devastated by the bomb and it underlines our commitment to the city and region. I'm showing someone round it this afternoon," says Murphy. And like that, he's gone.
