The Global Irishman: Liam Casey’s borderless world

You’ve studied the goods and compared the prices, and your latest electronic desire hovers in your online shopping cart, awaiting that final command. You click “Purchase” and you’ve tipped the domino, sparking a chain reaction that will play out on a global scale. 

Already, your order has appeared on a screen before nightshift workers on the other side of the world. A highly choreographed dance involving ever-changing flows of data, people, money, goods, and ideas brings the product to your doorstep, just two days later.

The choreographer of this global production is a former farmer from Cork whom you’ve probably never heard of. But he works behind the scenes to deliver the goods – quite literally – for some of the top makers of high-tech devices around today.

To do this he spans time zones, disregards borders, jets between continents, thinks spatially, works incessantly, and lives out of a Sheraton in Shenzhen, China. He’s an Irish-born man with the world as his stage.

Hyper connections

I caught up to Liam Casey on a recent autumn afternoon in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. To get there, I rode part of the Pacific Coast Highway, a long stretch of seaside road that holds special significance for Casey. 

He was in his late 20s, he explained, and had just spent ten years in the retail business, which he likened to a rat race. For the first time, he “had a chance to stand back and take a breather.” It was in Southern California just off the Pacific Coast Highway. “There was something about driving on it that just captured me.”

Casey also found the culture suited his personality well. “There’s a huge can-do attitude here in the U.S.,” he beams. “That’s one of the things I really liked – it’s very creative, very innovative.”

It was soon after, while working for a Southern California trading company, that Casey got the idea for his next move. He asked a Taiwanese colleague who imported hardware from Asia whether he had ever sold his products to Ireland. His answer: “I’ve never heard of that company.” It lit a fire under Casey. He realized there had to be great opportunity in Ireland to bring goods into Europe.

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Nster.com