by Denise McNamara
The millionaire owner of Galway Crystal, Irish American businessman George Moore, died last Wednesday at his home in Virginia outside Washington DC.
However the future of the global brand – which has its showhouse in Merlin Park – appears secure, with 85 people employed in the Galway side of the operation.
Galway Crystal was purchased by Mr Moore’s company Erne Heritage Holdings when it went into receivership on Good Friday in 1993.
The company, which owns Belleek Pottery in Fermanagh and Aynsley China based in Stoke-on-Trent, is run by four directors – John Maggiore (managing director) Martin Sharked (financial director) Arthur Goan (operations director) and Hugh Quinn, the Galway-based sales director.
The Belleek Group today employs over 275 people with a yearly turnover of €25 million.
While Mr Moore was chairman of the company, he had little to do with it in practical terms and his passing is unlikely to affect operations, reveals Hugh Quinn.
“His major focus was on IT companies. I had met him over the years and spoke with him last January at the annual creative expo in the RDS in Dublin. He was a nice man, very much focused on business, he enjoyed business and doing what he did,” Mr Quinn said.
“He left it to the local directors in the Belleek group. The last few years it was a perfect storm in some respects – a recession, a lot of independent retailers closing. But last year our credit sales were up by 20% and we’ve projected an increase of 10% in sales this year.”
Mr Moore, 62, died of a heart attack last Wednesday. He made his fortune after selling his first business, National Decision Systems (NDS), a San Diego software company, in 1990 for €73 million. In 2011 he sold a marketing technology company TargusInfo, which provided caller identification services, for €472 million. He was ranked among the wealthiest Irish on the Sunday TImes list at $205 million.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.
