A senior executive from Tesco has been appointed to grow the commercial revenues of the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA).

Jack McGowan is taking over as commercial director at the airport company. He is based in the UK as stores and non-food marketing director with Tesco.

A statement said Mr McGowan would have "specific responsibility for growing the DAA's existing commercial revenue streams and developing new commercial opportunities".

Chief executive Declan Collier said the Mr McGowan had considerable commercial and marketing experience across many product areas and geographical markets.

The DAA is about to embark on a €1.2 billion capital development programme to provide new capacity at Dublin Airport. Mr Collier said the company's ancillary revenues were tightly controlled by regulatory price caps, but other commercial revenue opportunities needed to be harnessed.

Mr McGowan has worked with Tesco since July 2002 and has been based at the retail group's UK headquarters in Hertfordshire since last February as stores and non-food market director.

Prior to this role, he served as head of marketing, Tesco Ireland, where he was responsible for marketing the group's online retail operations and co-ordinating Tesco's personal finance business.

From 1996 to 2002, he worked with Diageo in a range of senior consumer marketing positions.

Mr McGowan is from Dublin and has an engineering degree from Trinity College Dublin, where he graduated in 1985. He subsequently undertook a masters degree in control engineering at Cambridge University and completed an MBA at the Wharton School of Business in the US in the early 1990s.