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Dan Casey, executive vice president and managing director for EMEA at Future Electronics, talks to Steve Rogerson in our series of interviews for CIEonline.
A Canadian, married for over 30 years with two children, Dan Casey has worked all over the world for Future Electronics in various different roles. He began his career with Future Electronics in 1993 as VP and general manager for FAI Americas. After this, he lived in the UK for four and a half years holding the position as corporate vice president and managing director, and then moving to Singapore as corporate vice president and managing director for Asia Pacific.
After this position, Dan returned to Montreal and assumed various positions until he reached executive vice president. In this role, he was responsible for sales in EMEA and Asia Pacific as well as quality assurance and the supply chain programme in the Americas.
November 2007 saw Dan leave Future Electronics and hold the position of CEO at Sonomax Hearing Healthcare. After a year and a half Dan returned to Future Electronics as executive vice president and managing director for EMEA, a position in which is still holds today, along with the recently added responsibilities of worldwide engineering.
Prior to Future Electronics, Dan spent 13 years working for ABB in Canada.
1. Vicor has just announced that Future Electronics has been appointed as a global distributor. How important is that for the company?
Every time we expand our line card, it helps us with our customer base to offer them a wider number of solutions. We always want to find new customers and help existing customers find new solutions. Some of Vicor’s products are quite focussed and offer something new. It works nicely with what we are trying to get accomplished. They have a lot of power products that fit nicely with our verticals such as lighting.
They are an innovative company that will continue to come out with products. We had some holes in our product portfolio and they are helping us address that.
2. In 2007, you left Future to join Sonomax and returned to Future 18 months later. What went wrong at Sonomax?
I am not sure anything went wrong. I was looking for a change. They were a kind of start-up, though they’d been around for a while. I had never had the chance to run anything before in the public domain. It was under invested and I didn’t think it was going anywhere. They didn’t have all the cash they needed and it wasn’t the best career move. We managed to sell some of the technology to 3M and it gave us some money, and then I resigned and I don’t think the board was happy. Future then called me and asked if I wanted to come back, so I did.
3. The merger of NEC and Renesas led to Future Electronics losing the NEC account yet other distributors were kept on. Why do you think that happened?
A big part of the NEC business we were trying to push was on the display side. We were really pushing hard but they were the only one we had in that market. These were high-end displays and priced accordingly and aimed at markets such as high-end medical. That didn’t fit with our customer base at the time.
We may revisit that market later. But we under-invested in it at the time and didn’t give it the focus maybe it deserved. It didn’t get the bandwidth it needed from the sales force.
4. What do you paint and why?
I started painting when I came to Europe. My dad was an accomplished painter though that wasn’t his main profession – he was an engineer like me. My kids are quite artistic too. So I decided to try my hand at it and did some paintings for my children and wife and I was quite good. It keeps me from working too much.
I have about a dozen or so painting on the wall at home; some are OK, some not so much. I paint just about anything. I find an artist I like and look at their style and paint something a bit different. I do landscapes, people, a few animals. I have three to five artists I really like and try to learn from them. I’m self taught, I have never taken a lesson. It is fun.
5. You lived and worked for a while in Singapore – how different was it doing business over there to in Europe and the Americas?
Everyone has told me every time I have moved that I would have to adapt my style, but I just come into each region, whether it be Europe or Asia, and just keep my mouth shut for six months and listened. But I don’t think my style has really changed.
Asia is huge and flights from Singapore to China or Australia are long flights. We are building a hub in Shanghai now and that is the right thing to do.
We can set the directions of the company without saying as much in Asia as we need in Europe and North America, where people want to discuss things more. Asia buy into ideas a lot quicker than Europe and North America.
Out of the three areas, I really like Europe. I was more successful in Asia but that was the most stressful period for my family as I had two teenagers and it wasn’t working for them. So I came back to Montreal. Asia was really my favourite though but it was difficult for my family.
