Sunday Business Post
A trust controlled by Dermot Desmond’s family has bought a mansion on Shrewsbury Road in Dublin 4. The property was formerly owned by Sean Dunne who held it in trust for his wife before it was sold to a Cypriot company. The price paid was not disclosed. Dunne paid €58m for the property in 2005.
Ahead of a new RTE 1 programme, The Great Irish Sell off, which airs Monday at 9.35pm, there is a two page feature by Ian Kehoe, Francesca Comyn and Róisín Burke on the activities and implications of the “vulture funds” in Ireland.
A planned driving range at Donald Trump’s golf resort at Doonbeg, Co. Clare has been delayed as local residents complained to Clare County Council, describing the development as a “complete eyesore”. The planning is with An Bord Pleanála.
Ireland has been placed on a tax blacklist by Brazil, which may have potential negative tax consequences for Irish investors and businesses with dealings in Brazil. The reasons for the blacklisting have not been made clear by the Brazilian tax authorities. Other countries on the list include, Cyprus, Isle of Man and Panama. The Department of Finance is preparing a delegation to travel to meet with the Brazilian tax authorities.
Joe Devine, chairman of Troy Studios (Limerick-based TV and film studios), has been linked as a possible acquirer of Ardmore Studios based in Wicklow. Ardmore is currently owned by Ossie Kilkenny and Paul McGuinness. The studios are reported to be valued at €15m. Joe Devine is a director in the successful investment firm, Ion Equity.
Drop, a smart kitchen app founded in Ireland by entrepreneurs Ben Harris, Jack Phelan, Jonny McCauley and Tim Redfern, has announced a partnership with the appliance manufacturer, GE. “The partnership will help people to find recipes on the Drop mobile app and then preheat and monitor cooking remotely on GE ovens.”
Indian tech giant, Tech Mahindra, will open a Dublin office to support its European business. They will hire an initial 20 high-skill jobs, but have ambitions to increase this number. Tech Mahindra already employs 300 people in its call centre in Waterford. It provides services to telecoms operators and automotive companies, counting Tesco Mobile, Eir and Three among its Irish customers.
Aer Lingus may be facing strike action by their cabin crew, reportedly over a move by the airline to introduce a second trolley service on its transatlantic service with the aim of raising additional revenues from increased sales of refreshments and food.
“Low-cost carrier Norwegian has invested $65m in its Irish subsidiary as it prepares to launch transatlantic flights from Cork and Shannon.” This brings the total investment in the Irish subsidiary by its parent to $500m since 2013.
Michael Wright, the hospitality entrepreneur, is interviewed by Gillian Nelis in today’s paper.
Airbnb has featured recently in the debate on rising rental prices in our cities however its effect on rents is unclear. Economist and Daft.ie researcher, Ronan Lyons comments “It’s not clear to me in either the number of Airbnb listings or in the rental incomes they would get that Airbnb is a huge issue in the rental market.”
Tech entrepreneur Ray Nolan has become CEO of his start-up, XSellco. His latest start-up provides e-commerce products that are used by companies to sell goods on their websites. Nolan previously founded and sold Web Reservations International for €200m and was an investor in Skyscanner and held a reported 2% when it was sold for £1.4bn.
Bray Wanders FC are seeking to relocate from their town centre location to a site outside of the town, potentially freeing land with valuable development potential close to Bray’s Dart station.
Stephen Kinsella has a very interesting two-page report on fixing our healthcare system that is well worth a read.
Penny’s owner Primark has opened its second US store, taking a 55,000 sq. ft. space in the Staten Island Mall. The company entered the US market with the opening of a store in Boston 2015 and has set a target of 10 stores in the US.
A sign of consumer confidence, car borrowing has doubled since 2014, from €900m to almost €1.8bn. The majority of new cars are financed through debt rather than cash purchases, with PCP finance being the most popular form of credit for buying cars.
Iconic Offices last week raised €100,000 in two and a half hours on LinkedFinance. The company provides serviced offices and flexible workspaces in Dublin City. It currently has 14 offices in the city and plans to increase this to 18 by the end of the year. It is also targeting expansion into the UK and US.
Barry J White has an excellent interview with entrepreneur Enda O’Coineen. O’Coineen, at 61, unfortunately had to retire from a recent a solo round-the-world yacht race after his mast broke of the coast of New Zealand. Over his career, O’Coineen has been a “sailor, entrepreneur, central European telecoms pioneer, journalist, publisher, property speculator, pub promoter, management consultant and aspiring senator.”
Done Deal features a number of interesting recent deals this week.
There are features on Media & Marketing, Property and Exporting.
Sunday Independent
The results of Abrivia’s annual salary survey is published in today’s paper. Some of the big take outs:
- 40% of employers believe that the shortage in rental accommodation is damaging their ability to recruit staff.
- Almost 33% of employers expect to lose staff this year because of increasing rents.
- 47% of those living outside of Dublin said they would need a salary increase of over 20% to move to Dublin.
- 80% of employers are expecting to increase wages by up to 5% in 2017 and 72% plan to pay bonuses.
ComReg, Ireland’s telecom watchdog, has published a policy document online requesting the ability to increase fines applicable to operators who deliberately break the rules from €500k, up to €5m.
Irish Christmas television viewing has been falling over the last five year period as television battles against alternatives such as Netflix and YouTube. According to ad agencies, viewers watched 4% less TV over Christmas. On Christmas Day, people watched c. 7.6% less television in 2016 compared with 2011.
Richard Curran’s pieces this week:
- Management at Eir are set to receive a €181m pay-out for their shares when the company returns to the stock market. This is not the first large pay-out at Eir where executives land generous bonus/share payments whenever the company floats. The planned IPO is set to be the company’s third.
- US president-elect Donald Trumps has used his twitter account to bully Ford into pulling its planned $1.6bn factory in Mexico, thereby forcing it to invest $700m in Michigan instead. In Curran’s view, Trump aims to use public money borrowed from elsewhere and higher exchequer borrowing to subsidise the higher cost of manufacturing at home in order to make bold announcements about American jobs.
- Curran reports that Teagasc has recently predicted that average dairy margins should hit between €1.2k and €1.4k per hectare in 2017, an increase of between 58% and 78% on 2016’s average net margin of €795. The increase is on the back of predicted milk price rises of 15-20% which should bring milk prices above the price of production after a hard year in 2016.
- Lastly, he questions how dependable our rising Corporation Tax receipts are on multinationals given that 80% of 2015’s Corporation Tax take came from multinationals. Corporation Tax receipts hit €7.3bn in 2016, €739m ahead of expectations. With so many external pressures on reforming Corporation Tax, Curran thinks that we can’t afford to become too dependent on it.
Revenue has decided to launch a reformed version of The Co-Operative Compliance Framework that was first introduced in 2005 with limited success. Brian Keegan, director of public policy and taxation at Chartered Accountants Ireland warns “Cooperative compliance is dangerous because it creates and elite class of tax payers”. Benefits of this new scheme include having a dedicated case manager and fewer audits.
“There was a 46% surge in investments made through the Employment Investment Incentive Scheme (EIIS) last year, with a record €108m put into Irish firms, compared with €74.1m in 2015.”
Corlytics, the financial software start-up, has raised €2.75m from investors, including Fintrax founder Gerry Barry and ex-Trintech boss Cyril McGuire. Corlytics, led by chief executive John Byrne, has designed software that helps financial institutions manage regulatory requirements and aims to benefit from a growing cost of regulation faced by financial institutions on the back of the financial crisis.
The Department of Finance is finalising plans to take on extra staff in order to clear the backlog of cases in which taxpayers are challenging their bills. Almost 1.2k people are challenging bills worth hundreds of millions and sources believe it will take several years to clear all the cases.
Fergal Naughton, the chief executive at Glen Dimplex, has invested a mixture of debt and equity worth “substantially more” than €1m into Kenmare’s five star Park Hotel. John Brennan is the hotel’s managing director and he and his brother, well-known TV personality Francis Brennan, are both owners of the hotel. According to the company’s 2015 accounts, Beechside Company owed €7.4m in debt and made a profit of €211k in the year, and Brennan has said 2016 has been a better trading year for the hotel.
“Brewer Anheuser Busch InBev (AB InBev) and coffee maker Keurig Green Mountain have teamed up to develop a counter-top appliance that could dispense alcoholic drinks at home.”
Primark, the fashion group, and Dublin City Council have clashed over Primark’s plan to erect an illuminated clock outside the Penneys store on Mary Street.
76 Irish thoroughbreds were airlifted from Shannon airport to China last week, this was twice as big as the previous largest airlift of horses from Ireland to China. The airlift with cargo worth over €2m was purchased for Chinese businessman Zhang Yuesheng by Kildare-based bloodstock agency BBA Ireland at sales in Goffs last autumn from Irish breeders.
Boeing delivered 748 jetliners last year, 80 planes short of its goal for new orders in 2016, and booked net orders for 668 aircraft worth about $94bn at list prices. Airbus had forecast at least 670 deliveries in 2016 and is due to report totals on Wednesday. Boeing has a commercial backlog of 5.7k commercial jets which is equivalent to about 7 years of production.
Dan White has a great piece on how the November retail sales figures indicate that Irish retailers are having to cut prices to shift stock. For the month of November, the volume of non-motor retail sales rose by 4.9% year-on-year, meanwhile the value of these sales increased by only 2.2%, translating into an average price reduction of 2.5%.
Morgan Stanley, Wall Street’s biggest stock-trading firm by revenue is cutting its global bonus pool for the equities division by as much as 4% and plans let go some employees after the industry’s results lagged last year, according to people with knowledge of the plans. Revenue in the equity division dropped by 3.5% to €5.77bn in the first 9 months of 2016.
GSA Capital and Numeric, both computer-driven hedge funds, have taken bets against the Irish property market via a net short position in Cairn Homes, the housebuilding company led by chief executive Michael Stanley. As of Friday’s close, Cairn has a market cap of €920m and GSA and Numeric have net short positions worth 0.6% and 1.4% of Cairn, respectively.
This week’s interview is with Jack Canfield, the creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Mark Evans has a piece on the controversial switchover from Aer Lingus’s Gold Circle loyalty scheme to the new AerClub.
Dan O’Brien uses the IDA’s latest figures to illustrate Ireland’s increasing globalisation. The number of people working in foreign-owned, export-focused companies is just shy of 200k, employment in this area has increased by well over one-third since 2009. He argues the need to focus on fixing the problems in the domestic business environment which can be influenced because Trump’s anti-globalisation stance which is hostile to the companies which create so many jobs in Ireland is something that the Irish government can’t have much influence over.
The Sunday Business Post also reports under new EU laws, the IDA will now have to publically disclose details of the grants it provides to foreign companies in Ireland. This will include, naming the recipient of the grant, the amount received and what the grant is for. It is feared that this transparency will result in greater competition for the IDA by other countries’ development authorities.
Ailish O’Hora has a very informative Q&A style piece on the headwinds faced by the Irish food and drink industry as it enters 2017. The article includes input from Padraig Brennan, director of markets at Bord Bia, Helen Cahill, co-owner of Cahill’s Cheese, Rory Fanning, managing director at Slaney Foods and Liam Casey, Lidl’s commercial director.
Sunday Times
Denis O’Brien received more than €22m from the break-up of Blue Ocean Associates, a UK fuel group he bought in a 2012 deal that involved a €64m debt write-down from IBRC.
Brian Carey’s agenda piece this week:
- KBC bank are mulling their position in Ireland, they are currently positioned number four in Ireland and have a target reference point of number one or two in the market. Carey thinks they should stay in Ireland having taken the pain on their loan book, they have currently 14% of the mortgage market which is poised for significant incremental growth in the future.
- Carey reminds us of the backdrop of the international investments funds activity in Ireland. “In the NAMA and IBRC wind-down large portfolio sales were inevitable. The funds were the only ones with risk appetite and resources to bid. Gaps in the tax code or weaknesses in tenant or mortgages protection are not the fault of the funds. They did not abuse the system; they played by the rules, which were faulty and have been corrected”.
- Limerick city council is considering slashing development levies, shortly after increasing the property tax.
Bonuses at Dublin’s top stockbroking firms including Davy and Goodbody were greatly reduced last year as corporate activity collapsed, the bond market softened and flotations dried up.
A company controlled by former Fintrax owner Gerard Barry has been awarded €3m in damages by a Singapore court bringing an 11 year legal battle to an end. Main-Line Corporate, sued Singapore companies United Overseas Bank (UOB) and its business partner First Currency Choice (FCC) for infringing its patent for a currency conversion system.
Cormac Lucey’s piece covers the reduced poverty levels, improvements in literacy and the standard of living in the past two centuries but stresses growth in global population may threaten it all and replace progress with a battle for finite resources.
The Comer group, has revised plans to develop the 14-storey Sentinel building in Sandyford, south Dublin, the Comer brothers’ plan involves adding two extra floors to an existing six-storey part of the property.
American accounting watchdogs will begin arriving this year to inspect the quality of the audits of New York-Listed Irish companies and the local subsidiaries of US multinationals.
Inflight Dublin, which sells on-board entertainment packages to airlines has bought out minority shareholder Kish Capital for an initial $1.2m, it is believed Kish Capital, headed by Dan Ennis, held a 25% stake in the business and some of the consideration will be deferred.
Bartra Property, the Richard Barrett investment vehicle has just paid €3m for Glensavage house in Blackrock, Co Dublin. It plans to build an infill development on the site to include five five-bed houses and 16 apartments in two three-storey blocks.
Musgrave Group, which owns Supervalu and Centra, has lodged an appeal with An Bord Pleanala against permission granted for the development of a large scale office building within the Blackrock shopping centre.
Payzone, the electronic and internet payments firm, has agreed a new debt finance deal with Ulster Bank that will facilitate an early pay-out for Carlyle Cardinal Ireland fund (CCI), who own 90% of the equity. It is not disclosed how much CCI will receive as part of the pay-out. “Payzone is performing well and has been a good investment for CCI” said Carlyle’s Peter Garvey. The article also reports that GSLS another CCI investment reported operating profits of €4.4m in recently filed accounts, a rise of 33% in 12 months. Employment at the company also rose more than 30% in the period.
Sales at Kilkenny Group, the fashion and homewares retailer, came within touching distance of €30m last year but profits were down from €1.35m to €1.1m on the previous year as costs rose.
Marlin, a British hotel and serviced apartment group, has paid €2.6m for three buildings on Aungier Street in Dublin, which it plans to restore as part of the development of an adjacent 300-bedroom hotel site.
Bord Na Mona has bought a UK rival White Moss Horticulture – which employs 80 people in two facilities near Liverpool and Summerset, no price was disclosed.
Bank of Ireland is planning to return to selling mortgages through independent brokers in the second quarter of this year.
Coney, an investment of Bain Capital Credit fund, is seeking summary judgement against the former directors of the McWillaim Park Hotel, a Co Mayo hotel resort and popular country music venue.
The fast-growing retail technology company eShopWorld has recruited former Londis chief executive Stephen O’Riordan as chief operating officer as it bulks up to handle a growth surge. The company provides the technology for global retailers such as Nike and Victoria Secret to run localised websites, and also fulfils some of their orders.
Kerry city council is backing plans to develop an €18m film studio in the Clash industrial estate in Tralee.
Denis O’Brien’s Communicorp recorded a pre-tax profit of £2.85m in the UK last year. Despite the strong UK performance, the company, as a whole, lost €3.4m. The group’s Irish radio stations include Newstalk and Today FM.
Lagan Construction recorded a 77% rise in profits to £7.6m last year.
JTI Ireland, the country’s biggest cigarette company, recorded sales of €684m and profits of €18m in in 2015. The company is Japanese owned and owns the Silk Cut and Benson & Hedges brands.
Nick Webb’s inside track this week:
- Mark Duffy, the former head of Bank of Scotland (Ireland), is helping to raise money for a new fintech start-up called Izyfund. The venture aims to lend money to the European SME sector.
- Striking Out, the Amy Huberman-fronted legal series, was the biggest beneficiary of the section 481 tax break last year in Ireland.
- Elgin Energy, run by Ronan Kilduff, has emerged as one of the new players in the solar power land grab. It has already build up a number of solar farms in the south and west of the UK and is working on 14 separate opportunities in Ireland.
Brian Carey has an article which investigates the reasons why the midlands would appear to be a black spot for Multinational employment.
This week’s Sunday Times interview is with Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary and is a riveting read.
Patricia Callan, director of the Small Firms Association (SFA), wants a commitment from the government to keep costs down this year including wages and insurance.
21k – Number of new companies registered in Ireland last year, up 8% year-on-year, according to figures from @VisionNetLtd. @IndoBusiness
1.1% – The annualised increase in Eurozone inflation for the month of December. @IrishTimesBiz
7.2% – The unemployment rate for the month of December in 2016, the lowest level since August 2008, according to the @CSOIreland.
€47.9bn – The State’s tax take for 2016, a year-on-year increase of 5%, according to the latest figures released by @IRLDeptFinance.
72k – The number of used car imports in 2016, up 51% year-on-year. @IrishTimesBiz
€7.4tn – The amount of government debt maturing this year for the world’s leading economies, according to Bloomberg. @IrishTimesBiz
£1bn – Amount of additional investment Belfast plans to attract by 2035, according to Belfast City Council’s director of development.
8% – The predicted rise in property prices in 2017, according to a new report by @MyHomeProperty and @DavyGroup. @IrishTimesBiz