Healthy outlook keeps company chief fit and well

Jan 18 2010 By Karen Dent, The Journal

He's patrolled the Gaza strip, climbed mountains and heads the UK wing of an international pharmaceutical company based in Northumberland. Karen Dent discovers what drives Danish-born former North East Businessman of the Year, Bent Henriksen.

HE's lived in the North East for almost 40 years – more than half of his life – and has no desire to settle anywhere else, but Bent Henriksen denies he’s an adopted Geordie.

The managing director of Pharma Nord UK, who speaks "three or four languages" says: "No, you never get to be a Geordie. There’s always outsiders. It’s a very close community of people here but you are still an outsider, which is fine!"

Instead, he describes himself as feeling "European", although he reckons Northumberland was a much easier place to settle than Paris, where he lived for a short time because of work.

"The climate is the same, people are very similar with a similar life," says the 71-year-old. "It’s always different but yes, it was very easy. I thought I would end up in America – that was the idea – I would set the factory up here and move abroad as a vice-president in America and run Europe from there. We ended up staying here but that was good thing. It’s worked out very well."

The factory that brought Henriksen to the North East was owned by US company Elmwood Sensors. He arrived in North Tyneside in 1971 as the European sales manager and rose up the ranks to head the UK division.

From there, he shifted to TSL Thermal Syndicate in Wallsend in 1982, where he worked to turn the company around.

He says: "It was a company that had a lot of trouble, it had been losing money for 20 years and the bank wanted to close it down. We got a good grant from the Department of Industry, but unfortunately they wanted to sell it off to a French company and I didn’t agree with that."

Henriksen’s efforts at TSL earned him an honorary OBE in 1983 and the title of North East Businessman of the Year in 1986.

The business community’s gain was the Danish army’s loss. Henriksen went to Gaza as part of his national service in the early 1960s and signed up for another couple of years before deciding that wasn’t what he wanted to do with his talents.

"It was compulsory in Denmark for two years," he says. "I took two years in the Middle East and I went back to officer school and they started talking about long contracts and I didn’t want to do that.

"But I had a good time and the Middle East was very interesting. Gaza at that time wasn’t so bad, it was just after the English troops had left and the United Nations went in.

"There was very much peace at that time, there was no big trouble – only the trouble we made ourselves!"

When the talk turned to signing on the dotted line for a further 12 years, Henriksen returned to his first love – sales and marketing.

A job as a buyer for Danish medical company Leo Pharmaceutical was followed by three years with Carmen Clairol before he arrived in the UK.

Both those companies were in the healthcare sector but he says it is purely coincidence he returned to the pharmaceuticals industry.

In 1988, Henriksen started – and now owns 50% of – the UK division of Danish nutritional supplements giant Pharma Nord, which operates in 45 countries.

Based in Morpeth – "because I was here" – the company distributes Danish-manufactured products to wholesalers, chemists, health food stores and hospitals around the UK.

He says: "It could have been anywhere. But you know, it’s a pretty good place to be and everything we do, we send out the same day. We can have 24-hour delivery all over the country. We had a 17% increase [in turnover] last year – it was a tough year for the industry in 2009 but we managed to increase, whereas the industry actually went down about 8.5%.

"I think a lot of manufacturers are in trouble in our industry because it is very competitive right now."

The firm sells pharmaceutical-grade nutritional supplements and around 10% of its business is with hospitals.

"Everything we do is natural products, but a lot of them are used for treatment," says Henriksen.

"We have a product for insomnia which is sold to a lot to children’s hospitals – they don’t want to give them sleeping pills so they use a product called melatonin. That’s very good for us now."