Business Briefs More cell phones than ever

By Stephen McKinley

Latest statistics issued by telecommunications regulator Etain Doyle, show that almost 73 percent of the Irish population now own cell phones. The rise is considerable, given that the figures showed cell-phone ownership at 67 percent in December 2000.

Rivals to Eircom Plc. have captured 20 percent of the traditional fixed-line business, or double the figure in the same quarter last year. Traditional fixed-line business accounts for about two-thirds of all telecommunications revenue. Slightly less than a third of people in Ireland have Internet access at home and average weekly usage is 4 hours, 20 minutes, according to Stockex.ie.

Sell-off plans

Privatization plans continue in Ireland, as the government readies to sell off the waste and water services.

Four consortia have been chosen as framework legal and financial consultants. They are: Ernst and Young, Philip Lee solicitors and Bevan Ashford; Investec Gandon, with Mason Hayes, Curran and Shephard and Wedderburn; KPMG, A&L Goodbody and Denton Wilde Sapte, and Price WaterhouseCoopers, McCann Fitzgerald and L’Estrange and Brett.

The consortia will advise Ireland’s local authorities on how to put together Public Private Partnerships for their waste and water services and aid them in developing these PPPs through the procurement process.

The amount of financial and legal advice will vary, depending on the size, scope and complexity of each project and the type of PPP model chosen. The amount of PPP work is estimated to be £431.9 million, with water projects taking the lion’s share of the budget with more than 100 PPPs targeted within the next three years.

‘gon opens in Dublin

‘gon UK, the British life section of Dutch insurer ‘gon NV, has announced that it will open an offshore office in Dublin.

The move is part of an expansion that included the 1995 formation of Scottish Equitable International.

"We believe that a base in Dublin will enable us to develop products to complement our existing Luxembourg range, and provide a springboard for us to achieve future growth in the UK," Scottish Equitable International’s managing director, David Healy, said in a statement.

A spokesman said the new firm in Dublin was expected to carry the Scottish Equitable International name and was likely to be launched in the third quarter. ‘gon UK has assets in excess of £34 billion, while Scottish Equitable International has funds under management in excess of £1 billion.

Euro lag

European Commission figures show that Irish companies have been much slower to adopt the new single European currency than other member states in the European Union.

The survey shows that 8 percent of national payments by Irish companies are now transacted in euros, a 7 percent increase since last year.

This compares with three-quarters of Spanish and more than half of Belgium and Luxembourg’s transactions are done in euros. A mere 1 percent of Irish companies have euro bank accounts.

Another survey carried out by a European Commission research group found that more than half of Irish firms had no formal plans for the changeover, while less than half of companies said they had a formal changeover plan.

Only a quarter of Irish companies were pricing products in both pounds and euros. Yvonne Cullen of the EMU Business Awareness Campaign, said the findings are worrying.

"I think the general story coming out of all of the figures is that in every member state every company needs to be doing more," Cullen said. "Companies have information and are happy with those levels of information but are not taking the step further and actually putting into practice their plans for the changeover."

Part of the tardiness of Irish businesses is due to the millennium bug, Cullen said. When the much-feared bug failed to cause even the tiniest of problems, it helped make people more complacent.

"There was an awful lot of attention given to that issue and at the end of the day companies maybe felt we got through that without any great difficulty and we are going to do the same with the euro," Cullen said.

"But Y2K only effected one specific business process. The euro effects every aspect of business."