At the age of 62, Robert Kuijpers is still playing tennis for Holland. Most of his team-mates are retired, he says, but he combines this role with being chief executive of DHL Worldwide Express, the courier company.
Mr Kuijpers, based in Brussels but originally from Amsterdam, has not been in the Republic for more than a year. He is a serial traveller and points out with some relief that this trip is his second last this year. "I have always travelled. I am married now for 37 years with two kids and three grandchildren, and we get on pretty well. It is more difficult on my wife than on me. She is more often on her own."
He started playing "relatively serious tennis" when he was 16 and still plays it enough to have been on the over-60s Dutch team earlier this year when his country came sixth out of 24. Tennis got him his first major job, too, when, following two years army service, the president of his local club invited him to join the pharmaceutical company, Aspro Nicholas, as a salesman. He was also employed by Sterling Products and Beecham before joining HJ Heinz where he worked for Dr Tony O'Reilly for 14 years.
"A bit of an advantage in sport is you try to win but you lose so often, you do not get completely depressed when you lose," he says.
Being part of a company which is obsessed with movement - ironically using the gently-paced tourist boats in the city of his birth, Amsterdam, to avoid congestion - it must be difficult to negotiate Dublin's traffic chaos. But he welcomes the economic developments. He sees expansion opportunities as a point of principal for DHL even when specific new markets are unprofitable. This is why DHL is in African countries like Mauritania and Burundi. "There are routes where we lose money, there is no doubt about it, but it is a service to our customers. We get the return on the high density routes."
The business is changing, moving away from a traditional focus on document transportation because of the rise of the fax machine, the Internet and e-mail, and towards the rapid movement of spare parts for the electronics industry. But the Internet is also leading to e-business developments and, consequently, business for air express companies. "It is a fantastic business opportunity for companies like DHL to benefit from that new trend. And that is just starting." The other new area "where we are scraping the barrel" is creating "virtual global warehouses", developing logistics centres and providing spare parts from around the world to high-tech companies within 48 hours. DHL will be expanding its operations in Dublin as it gets more into servicing these companies. It is looking at double digit growth for the foreseeable future. "We do not see any end to it. We see further and further globalisation and these new communication technologies will help us," Mr Kuijpers says. Competitors, notably FedEx, TNT and UPS, are welcome. "You are better off having good competition rather than bad competition, because it drives you yourself to creating better customer satisfaction."
He guards against complacency at being the dominant global courier company outside of the US. "If it makes you comfortable, you are already dead," he says. For the past year-and-a-half he has worked for DHL, in a marked move away from consumer products to a service industry. But he says that as Heinz's managing director for Europe, he worked on transporting fresh foods quickly. "I am not a specialist in the operational side of the business, or aircraft. Over the years you learn a bit but at the end of the day, you are not a specialist on anything."
He describes DHL as a place where there are no routines and where he combines long-term planning with making day-to-day decisions. "Because something is happening somewhere all the time. It is moving so fast. If you are able to do that, it does not matter what your background is." He has an informal management style, saying informality is the essence of DHL. "The key thing is allowing employees of DHL wherever they are, whatever they do, to try new things, and if successful, it will benefit all of the company.
"That means you have to have a pretty open and informal way of communication."
He says DHL is open to negotiating with An Post to be its strategic partner. The State post office is understood to be negotiating with a number of players including Royal Mail (Britain), La Poste (France) and Deutsche Post (Germany), as a process of considering its options. Deutsche Post is also a 25 per cent stakeholder in DHL International, as is Lufthansa Cargo and Japan Airlines, with the remaining 25 per cent held by private individuals. Mr Kuijpers says the company is "definitely interested" in being a strategic partner, even though no equity stake in An Post will be offered. DHL has worked with other post office companies without equity participation, he says, and any such arrangement with An Post would be "win, win". "There does not have to be equity if it is commercially interesting for both parties." Last week, the Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke, told the Dail that giving a partner equity in An Post would give it influence "far beyond the worth of the money". DHL may go the initial public offering route to find the finance needed to tackle the growing market, particularly in Asia. "We might go partly public over the next three years or so," Mr Kuijpers says.
Currently DHL International, an associate of DHL Airways, which handles the US market only, has a turnover of about $4.7 billion (€4.6 billion), with the overall group, operating under the common trademark, DHL Worldwide Express, having a turnover of $5.7 billion.
Mr Kuijpers does not specify how much he is paid but does say that it is more than what his father, a professional musician, earned. His mother, the more practical of his parents, told him to learn to type, a skill which he still regrets not picking up.
His advice to business people starting out is not to make the same mistake twice. "And the other thing is try to do well what you do, because that will be recognised, normally speaking."
