Shares in fruit distributor Fyffes surged nearly 6% this afternoon after the company announced it is scaling back investment in its Worldoffruit.com internet subsidiary, due to falling market interest in e-commerce projects.
Fyffes shares are trading up to 1 euro 8 cents, still a far cry from the high of 4 euros last year on the back of market enthusiasm that Fyffes' business-to-business portal was a potential dot com triumph. There were also plans to float the business.
As sentiment in the technology sector has dwindled Fyffes share price has dropped dramatically and prompting an extensive share buy back operation by the McCann family in the past few weeks.
Fyffes says worldoffruit will continue to operate, but on a 'significantly reduced scale', with costs and staff numbers reduced accordingly. Expenditure on the project was 15 million euros last year.
