DUBLIN'S GRESHAM HOTEL ATTRACTS FINAL BIDS OF UP TO €85m - Dublin’s landmark four-star Gresham Hotel is understood to have attracted final offers of up to €85 million as four shortlisted bidders met a deadline yesterday.
It is expected that the bidders - Spain’s Riu Hotel Group, private equity firms Cerberus and Apollo, and investment banking giant Goldman Sachs - will have to wait until next week to learn who has won, given the complicated nature of the transaction. Goldman Sachs is bidding through Irish hotel company Tifco, in which the New York bank took a controlling stake in 2014. Bidders were asked to submit separate offers for the Gresham Hotel and for the asset plus a number of corporate entities, says the Irish Times. The O’Connell Street hotel, comprising 323 guest rooms including 10 individually designed suites, is being sold by Precinct Investments, a company controlled by housebuilder Bryan Cullen, which paid €117 million for the business in 2004. The sale, being managed by CBRE and Christie & Co, is a consensual one according to a plan drawn up by Precinct and the National Asset Management Agency, which took over its bank loans during the financial crisis.
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STARBUCKS IRELAND IN THE BLACK WITH €1.1M PROFIT - Pre-tax profits at the main Irish arm of coffee giant Starbucks halved to €1.14m last year.
Abridged accounts just filed by Ritea Ltd - formerly Starbucks Coffee Company (Ireland) Ltd - show that the firm recorded the drop in pre-tax profits in spite of gross profits increasing by 32% to €2.18m in the 12 months to the end of July last. The prior period when a gross profit figure of €1.48m was recorded was for 10 months. The comparatively high pre-tax profits of 2014 of €2.3m arose chiefly from an exceptional gain of €1.27m. The Starbucks operation in Ireland is licensed to Dublin-based Entertainment Enterprises Group, which is run by Colum and Ciaran Butler, writes the Irish Independent. The Starbucks' operation has enjoyed exponential growth under the Butlers' control with the number of coffee outlets in the greater Dublin area now standing at more than 50. The first Starbucks in Ireland opened at Dundrum Town centre in south Dublin back in 2005. The Starbucks franchise has also expanded outside Dublin in recent times and now operates two outlets in Limerick and six in Cork. The business also has outlets in Kildare Village, Athlone, Dundalk and Drogheda.
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€10m SOUGHT BY MINISTER FOR JOBS FOR SMALL BUSINESS - The Minister for Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation, Mary Mitchell O’Connor, is hoping to secure a further €10m of exchequer funding to keep Microfinance Ireland afloat beyond 2017.
Microfinance Ireland is the State-backed project aimed at funding small businesses. Ms Mitchell O’Connor also said the €11.7m lent by Microfinance Ireland has helped sustain 2,000 jobs, reports the Irish Examiner. In a written Dáil reply to Fianna Fáil’s Niall Collins, she described the output by Microfinance Ireland as “a very satisfactory performance in a difficult market at a very difficult time”. Ms Mitchell O’Connor said that, since its inception in October 2012, Microfinance Ireland has approved 867 loans out of 1,826 loan applications received. Some 591 applications were declined with 317 being withdrawn. Microfinance Ireland was established by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation under the Action Plan for Jobs. Ms Mitchell O’Connor said: “To secure the future development of Microfinance Ireland my officials are in negotiations regarding securing a tranche of €10m additional exchequer funding required to keep the fund operating as a going concern beyond 2017 in line with company law requirements. This equity injection is combined with additional bank funding of €15m.” Last year, the State-backed, not-for-profit lender had a record 50% rise in the number of loan applications.
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ALIBABA'S MA UNDERCUTS COUNTERFEITING FIGHT WITH CLAIM THAT FAKES ARE BETTER - Many counterfeit goods are now of better quality than the genuine articles, Alibaba founder Jack Ma has said in comments set to infuriate luxury goods makers who accuse the Chinese ecommerce group of profiting from the sale of knock-offs.
"We have to protect [intellectual property], we have to do everything to stop the fake products, but OEMs are making better products at a better price," Mr Ma said, referring to original equipment manufacturers that typically make products for branded sellers. "The problem is the fake products today are of better quality and better price than the real names," he said during a speech at Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou. "They are exactly the [same] factories, exactly the same raw materials but they do not use the names." The remarks were an apparent riposte to longstanding criticism that Alibaba has tolerated the sale of counterfeit goods on platforms such as Taobao, says the Financial Times. Mr Ma called on brands to accept that the "way of doing business has [been] changed" by the internet, creating new opportunities for Chinese factories that have traditionally supplied the likes of Apple and Louis Vuitton.
