IRISH FIRMS PLACE 10 BILLION OF ORDERS FOR AIRPLANES AT PARIS SHOW - Irish aircraft-leasing firms placed $11 billion (€9.87 billion) of orders at the Paris Airshow.
AerCap's order for 100 Boeing jets accounted for the bulk of the buying, with rival SMBC snapping up 10 passenger planes from the US maker, says the Irish Independent. The massive Irish orders helped push Boeing ahead of European rival Airbus in the battle for commercial air supremacy. AerCap's deal to buy 100 737 MAX 8 jets is worth $10.7 billion at list prices. AerCap, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, is formally headquartered in the Netherlands but is effectively run out of offices in Shannon and Dublin. Aercap chief executive officer (CEO) Aengus Kelly said the deal came together in the final days before the show, with Boeing saying it wanted to "make this happen". Aercap is also interested in buying larger 737 MAX 9 to help replace ageing models in its fleet, Mr Kelly said. Meanwhile, Dublin-headquartered SMBC Aviation Capital, headed by Peter Barrett, agreed to buy 10 Boeing 737 MAX 8s. The aircraft-leasing sector, which buys planes and leases them to airlines, is growing thanks to rising demand in Asia and Central and South America, as well as the need to replace ageing planes in Europe and North America, Mr Barrett said.
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LOTTERY OPERATOR LOSES €17.4 MILLION IN 19 MONTHS - The new operator of the National Lottery made a loss of €17.4 million in the 19 months to the end of 2014, due to expenses associated with the transition and borrowing costs. Premier Lotteries Ireland (PLI), which took over the lottery licence on November 30th, is now eyeing online growth as it focuses on growing sales, writes the Irish Times. According to results filed with the Companies Registration Office, PLI, which paid €405 million to operate the licence for 20 years, reported a pre-tax loss of €17.4 million in the period from May 22nd, 2013 to December 31st, 2014. The PLI consortium, which includes An Post and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, owners of UK operator Camelot, started trading on November 30th, 2014. Over the 19 month period, but realistically just in December as it had just started trading the, PLI reported total sales of €56.8 million, "reflecting strong sales in our scratchcard and Lotto games". As a comparison, in 2013 An Post, the former operator of the Lotto, reported full year sales of €685 millio and profits of €205 million, down from sales of €735 millio in 2012.
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MCD ENJOYS GOOD YEAR DESPITE ATTENDANCE FALL - Numbers attending events promoted by Denis Desmond’s MCD Productions firm this year will not hit the heights of 2014 due to an anticipated quiet final quarter. Nevertheless, Mr Desmond has said business in 2015 to date has been very good ahead of a busy summer calendar featuring the likes of the annual Electric Picnic festival and one-off concerts by AC/DC and Swedish DJ Avicii, reports the Irish Examiner. Some 45,000 people are expected to attend this year’s Electric Picnic event from September 4-6 and Mr Desmond said that concert tickets in Ireland are now cheaper than concert tickets in the UK. The promoter said he expects the Longitude Festival at Marlay Park in Dublin to sell out in early July. Last year, the numbers going to MCD-promoted events grew by 12.5% to 1.5 million in a bumper year for the promoters. According to figures released by music industry trade journal Pollstar, ticket sales for MCD events last year rose 165,000 from 1.32 million to 1.49 million.
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NESTLE CUTS AFRICA WORKFORCE AS MIDDLE CLASS GROWTH DISAPPOINTS - Nestlé, the biggest food and drinks company, is cutting 15% of its workforce across 21 African countries because it says it overestimated the rise of the middle class. “We thought this would be the next Asia, but we have realised the middle class here in the region is extremely small and it is not really growing,” Cornel Krummenacher, chief executive for Nestlé’s equatorial Africa region, told the Financial Times in an interview at the regional headquarters in Nairobi. The region covers 21 countries including Kenya, DR Congo and Angola. The retrenchment is in contrast with Africa’s consumption-fuelled growth story, which has drawn investors in search of a new, fast-growing market. It underlines difficulties for foreign entrants into the sub-Saharan markets, which are dominated by family businesses broadly thriving on local know-how and the sale of cheap products tailored to individual countries. Mr Krummenacher said turnover in the region had failed to deliver in line with initial growth forecasts set out in 2008, when Nestlé, which has invested close to $1 bILLIOn in Africa in the last decade, stepped up its expansion in the region. Since then it has built a clutch of new factories, aiming to double its business every three years. Instead, so far this year, Nestlé has closed its offices in Rwanda and Uganda entirely, is reducing its product line by half, and might close some of its 15 warehouses before September.
