LOANE FAMILY SAVE BUY & SELL - Buy & Sell is the classified advertisement magazine which has been a newsagent's staple for many years. But the magazine and its associated website went into examinership in June with debts of €18.3m owed to National Irish Bank. The title is a profitable business and since then there has been efforts to save the company which today employs 55 people. Yesterday it was announced that the Loane family have bought the company. Nelson Loane was a former CEO of the Adare Group.
Elgin Loane says that Buy & Sell is a very strong brand and the website is one of the country's busiest. Pointing out that the paper is nationwide with five editions weekly, he said he was delighted to have secured the deal. He said that Buy & Sell is seen as a full cycle business, which did exceptionally well in the good times and pretty well in the hard times. The 55 staff at the business will be holding on their jobs, Mr Loane says, and their former terms and conditions will be matched. He says the family intends to hold on to paper for 'quite a while' and says he sees lots of advantages in bringing some focus to the business.
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SHARES TO KEEP RISING BUT AT LESS DRAMATIC SPEEDS - KBC Asset Management yesterday issued a note on their company blog titled: 'Equities not cheap but will end the year higher than now'. KBC asset management chief economist Eoin Fahy says that when one compares the market values of today to six months ago, they will see a rise in the order of 50% or more.
'People were pricing in the end of the world in financial markets terms,' he states. He says the banks were bust, the governments were bust and the world economy was in a deep depression.
The economist says that over the past six months markets have seen rises of over 50%, which brought us from prices being ridiculously cheap back to a level of price-earnings ratios, the normal stock market measure of valuations. What this means from now on, is that the recovery will not be at the rate of 50% every six months, but will rise broadly in line with company profits and the general economic situation.
Mr Fahy says that people have missed out on 50-80% rises in share prices, but points out that the markets fell dramatically before that recovery and the rises experienced over the past few months have not yet brought investors back to their starting levels.
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MORNING BRIEFS - Tesco this morning says it spent £15m sterling shutting all its Irish stores and reopening them with new shelving arrangements and products as part of its fight to gain market share. That move was reaction to the haemorrhaging of Tesco's border stores up north. The supermarket chain today announced half-year group pre-tax profits of £1.42 billion sterling, an increase of 1.5% on a year earlier after total sales of £30.4 billion.
*** The average number of days it takes a small firm to get paid is now 66 days and in the last three months almost 50% of firms say their clients are taking longer to pay them. That is according to the Small Firms Association, which says small businesses are being used as a source of interest free credit and a small claims court for business needs to be established.
*** On the currency markets, the euro is worth $1.4716 US cent and 92.1 pence sterling.
