When Bronwyn Brophy was about ten, her father lost his job and had to sign on weekly at the dole office. It had a “profound impact” on the young girl from Malahide.
“My dad, a salesman, wasn’t on the dole for long but I remember being terrified of not having enough and being poor. I am often asked what drove me, and I think that was the catalyst.”
So far so good for 49-year-old Brophy, who has never had to hit the dole office but last year got the job of her dreams in Sweden.
• Doyens of the Irish diaspora in the world of business
She heads up Vitrolife, a supplier of medical devices and genetic testing services to IVF clinics, which is listed on the Nasdaq Stockholm stock exchange.
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With a market cap of about €2.1 billion and a staff of 1,100, Vitrolife is one of the world’s biggest players in assisted reproduction. Its customers include public hospitals and very large IVF clinic chains, many of which are being bought up by private equity in a market that is consolidating.
With last month’s departure of Margaret Sweeney as boss of Ires, the residential landlord, Brophy — who will earn a base salary of about €1.2 million this year — is possibly the only Irish-born female chief executive of a publicly traded company in the world today.
That will change in June when Adaire Fox-Martin, former Google Ireland boss, takes up the chief executive role at Equinix, a California-headquartered data centre company.
The talkative and charming Brophy, who has a fantastic laugh, is modest about her achievements.
“I’d love to say I am a great person for getting to the position of chief executive and I do have global experience, but I was a female under 50 in a management position — there aren’t very many of us at my age in the industry,” she says.
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Since starting the new job last August, Brophy has hit the ground running.
She and her management team presented a corporate strategy in December, a key part of which is automating and trying to digitalise the IVF patient journey “because it’s very labour intensive now and anything that is labour intensive in healthcare is not scalable”.
She also made her first acquisition: spending €18 million on eFertility, a Dutch software management company for IVF clinics.
That is small beans compared to the mammoth €1.25 billion outlay in 2021 when Vitrolife bought Igenomix, a genetic testing specialist. But Brophy says the eFertility acquisition is “an important one”.
“It is very strategic. It plays really nicely into our corporate strategy and what we are trying to do to digitalise the IVF journey,” she adds.
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“I keep saying to my team, ‘Don’t break it.’ I find when you make acquisitions of smaller companies like that, you have to be very careful not to smother them with love.”
On her third week in the job at Vitrolife, Brophy spent an entire day in scrubs at an IVF clinic in Gothenburg in western Sweden, to “get a feel for what the clients needed”.
She could have spent her entire career in scrubs were it not for the advice of a teacher at her Raheny secondary school, Manor House.
“About five months before the Leaving Cert, she called me down to the classroom and said she didn’t think I should study medicine because she thought I’d be miserable. She told me I was made for the world of business. She sowed a little seed of doubt and I changed my CAO form, putting down international marketing and languages at DCU as my top choice,” Brophy says.
“I got it and on the first day I sat in the front row and thought I’d made a mistake. I struggled with that decision for years and was 32 before I fully let go of the idea of being a doctor.”
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Instead, Brophy is a self-described “medtech lifer”. She started her career in the graduate programme at Johnson & Johnson in 1997 and ended up working for 15 years across its various medtech companies.
In the early days of her time there, she says she accidentally sent 1,400 bottles of baby shampoo to Beaumont Hospital, whose management, understandably, “went ballistic”.
“I think I emptied the warehouse of baby shampoo — so much so it earned me the nickname of Baby down in the warehouse of Tallaght, and I couldn’t shake it off for years.”
By the time she left J&J, she had worked her way up to become a global commercial director at Advanced Sterilization Products, a maker of infection protection products for hospitals, and latterly general manager for UK and Ireland at Cordis, which makes medical devices for coronary and vascular diseases.
She lists Pauric O’Grady, a one-time managing director of Johnson & Johnson Medical, as a “great mentor” who told her if she was going to go all the way in medical devices, she would need to pack her bags and live abroad.
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She left Ireland in 2004 to work for two years in Madrid with Johnson & Johnson. She has spent her career dipping in and out of Ireland, having stints in Switzerland, the UK, the US and Sweden.
“A lot of Irish people working in medtech and in pharma don’t want to leave the Emerald Isle. They want to be super successful but want to stay there. Look at where the ones who left are, people like Liam Condon [chief executive of Johnson Matthey, a UK engineering giant, who built his career in medtech] and Liam Kelly, CEO of Teleflex [a New York Stock Exchange-listed medtech company].”
Brophy says she made a lot of sacrifices, personal and professional, to get where she is today.
“My career is not an accident. When I decided I wasn’t going to go back to college to do medicine, it became very premeditated. I decided I was going to be a general manager by 35, a vice-president by 40 and a chief executive by 50.”
In late 2011, she left J&J to have a second child — she recommends that people not put off having babies for their careers — and set up Vidamed Consulting, helping US start-ups such as AliveCor commercialise in Europe.
Two years later, she was lured back into employment by Korn Ferry, an executive recruiter, when she was offered a job as vice-president of early technologies with Covidien, an Irish-headquartered medtech supplier.
In 2014, Brophy was working in Dublin when she got a message from the bosses asking her to bring a “few important executives” visiting the capital to an Irish pub.
“I took the lads down to O’Donoghue’s and Doheny & Nesbitt. Little did I know that that very night was the night when Medtronic [one of the world’s biggest medical companies] and Covidien had shook on a [$42.9 billion] deal that was one of the biggest medtech acquisitions in history.”
The Dublin woman’s arrival at Gothenburg-heaquartered Vitrolife was a serendipitous one.
In 2019, when she was working for women’s health in Medtronic, with a brief to build out its $5.5 billion women’s health portfolio, she went to management with a proposal.
“I made a pitch to the leadership of Medtronic to buy Vitrolife: it was in a really attractive space, high growth, full portfolio, really good quality, great vision and mission. But at the time Medtronic was going all in on robotics. They liked the pitch but investments were going elsewhere.”
Fast forward a few years, Brophy had departed Medtronic for Thermo Fisher Scientific, another medtech multinational, and was working in Sweden as global leader for its immunodiagnostics division when she got another call from Korn Ferry.
“A chief executive role was going at a medtech firm but I said I wasn’t interested because I was sitting pretty in Thermo Fisher. Then they told me the company was Vitrolife.”
As head of a publicly listed company, Brophy is cognisant of shareholder demands but tries not to lose sleep over the share price.
She has skin in the game. Last September, she acquired 19,350 shares in Vitrolife for just under 2.5 million Swedish kronor (€215,000), about 128kr a share. The share price has risen nearly 40 per cent since, although it is down about 8 per cent in the year to date.
“I have a fantastic chairman [Jón Sigurdsson] who advised me on my first day to not look at the share price, but it is impossible not to. I am not one of these people who picks up the phone first thing in the morning to look at the share price, but I do look at it every single week.
“We need to create shareholder value. I subscribe to the school of running the company to the best of my ability, driving long-term sustainable profitable growth, and if I do that, the share price appreciation will come.”
Vitrolife had sales of just over €300 million last year, up 9 per cent on the previous year. The long-term prospects of the business are “very, very good”, according to Brophy, who is confident of getting the business back to double-digit growth.
She will do that by growing Vitrolife’s business across the Atlantic: “My No 1 target market now is the US. We’re on a mission there, and we’ve just recruited a new senior vice-president for North America.”
Vitrolife’s main competitor is CooperSurgical, a Connecticut-headquartered private company that has 3,000 employees and is part of the Nasdaq-listed CooperCompanies.
CooperSurgical has a stronghold in the US, while Vitrolife is the bigger player in Europe. Brophy is determined to grow the US market share.
“It will be like the Ryder Cup, and Europe taking on the US. I am an extremely competitive person,” she says.
There is room for both companies, however, especially as the demand for assistive reproduction grows.
“The sad reality for mankind is one in six people globally are affected by fertility. The market is growing between 5 and 7 per cent annually,” says Brophy.
Still, access and affordability represent a “huge challenge and constraining growth”. Brophy points to prohibitive costs in the US — where one IVF cycle can cost more than $25,000 — as an example.
“The other challenge we have is scalability. Even in clinics where you do have coverage and you have good insurance coverage, waiting lists are very long. There is a shortage of doctors, nurses and lab technicians.”
Brophy says she wants Vitrolife to be at the forefront of automating the industry. After the eFertility deal, she has another couple of companies on her acquisitions “hitlist” to help achieve that aim.
She sees Vitrolife as a long-term commitment as she takes the company “on a journey”.
“I have the dream job. I’m working in medical devices in an area where people really need help. How lucky am I?”
The Life of Bronwyn Brophy
Age: 49
Lives: Gothenburg, Sweden
Family: married to Shay O’Connor, with two children, Senan, 14 and Inés, 11
Education: Manor House secondary school, Raheny; degree in international marketing and languages and an MBA from DCU; and a non-executive directorship at Harvard
Favourite film: The Greatest Showman
Favourite book: Atomic Habits by James Clear
Working day
This is Scandinavia, the sun comes up early, so I wake at about 6.30am. I don’t pick up the phone first thing; the first thing I do is look out the window at nature. Then, I’m really unhealthy, I have a coffee and a bar of chocolate for breakfast. I either go to the office or travel. Dealing with shareholders, analysts, AGMs, earnings calls, etc, takes up a lot of my time.
Downtime
I run and do weights five days a week. I love spending time with my husband and my kids. I am also a firm believer in you should try new things so, since coming to Sweden, I have started piano lessons and am doing a recital with my daughter next month. I also started playing golf with my son.
