By Stephen McKinley
The parent company of Bewley’s coffee stores, Campbell Bewley, has bought a Chicago-based cafe chain from Wall Street Deli, Inc., for an undisclosed sum of money.
This will add a further six outlets to Campbell Bewley’s 70 U.S.-based outlets, and should bring in an additional $5 million in revenue on top of annual revenues of $75 million, according to the company. Campbell Bewley will rebrand the outlet under its Rebecca’s Cafe name.
The second wave?
If biotechnology companies continue to perform as well as they have been, then the success of such companies will make the high-tech boom seem like a blip on the radar screen.
Identigen, a Trinity College-based biotech company, has signed a multi-million-pound licensing agreement for its DNA-tracing technology with the French biotech company Silliker Biomerieux, reports the Irish Times.
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Identigen has created a quality-assurance system for the meat industry based upon DNA testing. The system is called TraceBack, and has now been licensed to Silliker, a subsidiary of the French biotechnology group Biomerieux Pierre Fabre.
Net down, not out
Dot.bomb? Think again, say analysts, who have predicted that despite recent choppy waters, the high-tech world will rebound with a potential investment of over $5 trillion in the next few years. The World 2001 Survey, conducted in 27 countries, argues that current market assumptions are incorrect and the dot.com crash is irrelevant. Invest, oh, ye of little faith . . .
However, more job cuts and company closures are likely in the domestic technology sector, but the Republic is weathering the storm better than most, according to technology analysts and IDA Ireland.
Government figures suggest almost 4,000 people have been made redundant since the beginning of the year, with about 1,200 of the job losses occurring within IDA Ireland’s technology portfolio.
This is a much better record than in the U.S., where thousands of job losses have been announced, and in the UK, where this week alone 3,000 jobs were lost as Motorola shut a plant in Scotland.
Crystal sales down
Crystal tourist trade is down from foot-and-mouth disease, according to Waterford Crystal president and chief executive Redmond O’Donoghue. Sixty percent of the $60 million sales every year comes from tourists, mainly from the U.S. Last year’s worldwide sales were about $500 million. O’Donoghue said that foot and mouth was causing a tourist downturn and sales would not escape the loss of tourist revenue.
Job creation lower
Last year, a phenomenal 23,000 jobs were created in Ireland, due in part to U.S.-based companies attracted, naturally, by Ireland’s cheaper labor costs and lower corporate tax rate. But this year, the figures will fall — to around 14,000 new jobs in 2001. A spokesman for the IDA did, however, acknowledge that the lower end of the skills market last year suffered with the loss of 8,100 jobs. It is not believed that job losses will run that high in 2001.
Thurles jobs lost
French multinational Moulinex has announced the closure of its GMX electrical appliance plant in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, with the loss of 230 jobs. The move, ominous for the Irish job scene, is part of the company’s worldwide cutback of 4,000 jobs from a workforce of 10,000. Moulinex closed its Krupps plant in Limerick in 1999, with the loss of 500 jobs.
The current round of job cuts may be premature — some U.S. economists say they believe the recession will be extremely mild at worst, and that the layoffs may well be followed by hasty rehirings.
EC slaps wrists
After last year’s giveaway Irish budget, heavily criticized by the European Commission (EC), a new round of guidelines from the EC will prevent a similar budget this year. The government will have to limit spending growth to just 4 percent in its pre-election budget in order to avoid another confrontation with the EC. The commission has called for Charlie McCreevy, Ireland’s finance minister, to "improve expenditure control, reintroducing from 2002 clear norms on spending aggregates."
McCreevy will have to introduce his 4 percent average spending target, which has been effectively abandoned in recent year as spending growth increased to its current level of 21 percent.
Times reports earnings
The Irish Times has reported overall profits of about $17 million for the year 2000, derived mainly from sale of quayside property and a 9-month-old price increase of the newspaper.