One More Thing

Irish bookies spend their money wisely, the return of high dotcom prices and the consequences of the €320m Square deal.

 Irish win inTV turf war

There appears to be no end in sight to the turf wars between Britain's major racetracks and the high-street bookmakers, but clues are emerging as to who might win the fight.

Earlier this year, 20 tracks including Cheltenham, Aintree, Ascot and Epsom joined forces with data supplier Alphameric to form TurfTV, to control the picture and data rights from these tracks which are fed to bookies' shops.

This was supplied by Satellite Information Systems (SIS), but the tracks' contracts with SIS have either ended or are due to end in December. The tracks decided to make the bookies pay a bit more for the service.

However, big British chains like Ladbrokes and Coral are blacking the service as they say they have to pay SIS for one set of tracks and TurfTV for another group and are not prepared to do this, as it is adding to their costs.

Conversely, Irish bookmakers, including Paddy Power and Boyles, have agreed to pay up, on the basis that they're not going to ask customers to bet on races they can't see.

This may be paying off. Last Saturday afternoon, the only racing available was being broadcast via TurfTV. A Racing Post reporter went to see what impact this was having on bookies in Wimbledon in London. The local Ladbrokes was closed, Corals was empty and the Paddy Power (one of 60 in the UK) was full.

Dotcom mania is back in business

It's official. Dotcom mania is back. And with a vengeance.

This week RH Donnelley, publisher of the Yellow Pages in a number of US states, said that it would spend a cool $345 million (€250 million) to acquire Business.com. And it's not just Donnelley executives that are having a rush of blood to the head.

The group won the rights to the internet domain in an auction that also included the New York Times, Dow Jones and News Corp, which is of course in turn seeking to wrestle control of Dow Jones and its flagship title, the Wall Street Journal.

It has been a long time since a business was sold almost entirely on the basis of the internet domain that it owns.

The last laugh is being enjoyed by Jake Winebaum and Sky Dayton, the internet veterans who established Business.com.

They purchased the domain name back in 1999 for $7.5 million. That attracted plenty of headlines at the time, with more than one commentator saying that the two executives would be hard pressed to make their money back.

Of course, that move now seems like a prescient corporate manoeuvre. The site acts as a directory of business services and its cut of referral fees and online advertising enabled it to limp along through the lean years of the internet at the start of the decade.

Recently, it was reported that Business.com had earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of just $15 million, so Donnelley is taking a big gamble and paying top dollar.

"With this transaction, RH Donnelley takes another significant step forward in the online local commercial search marketplace," said David Swanson, the company's chairman and chief executive.

Translated into English, Swanson is hoping that consumers are going to move from the paper Yellow Pages to their electronic equivalent.

Another internet veteran was back in the news this week as well. Marc Andreessen who co-founded Netscape, the company whose IPO in 1995 almost single-handedly kickstarted the US obsession with internet stocks, has cashed in his chips again. The former Time cover star has sold his Opsware software business to HP for $1.6 billion. Andreessen is reported to hold about 7 per cent of the firm, which means he should net about $113 million from the deal.

It seems that despite all the hype about Web 2.0 and Google becoming the new Microsoft, some things in the world of online business don't change that much at all.

Square deal sees property investors building on success

Signs are abroad that the universe of Irish property investors is reaching a new stage of maturity, at least in parts. Within the past week, we have seen two sales by Quinlan Private and one by Bank of Ireland Private Banking, institutions that have previously been best known for acquiring rather than offloading.

The Bank of Ireland sale of the Cartier building in Paris must have been particularly pleasurable: they drew a 96 per cent profit over a 19-month period.

Quinlan, likewise, did well in a very short time in Poland. Together with a Norwegian company, it sold a shopping centre for €128 million that was reportedly built for €47 million a year or so ago.

The deal that eclipsed even this though was last weekend's sale of part of The Square in Tallaght for €320 million. The return for Quinlan's investors was said to be twenty-fold on money they had squirreled away a decade and a half earlier.

With every seller, however, there is always a buyer. In this case, it was none other than Noel Smyth, one of the first real Irish property men and an individual who in the past hasn't done badly out of a risky move here and there, though it must be remembered that Smyth's history is also one of defeats, with the loss of Dunloe Ewart to Liam Carroll in 2002 a particularly low point.

In relation to Tallaght, the question arises: who made the most mature move - Smyth or Quinlan? The answer, which could be worth millions, is unlikely to emerge for a good few years. The best case for the wider economy is that both will come out on top: Smyth by cashing in on new development at Tallaght and Quinlan by recycling the funds into other lucrative projects.

One thing is for sure: both are well-placed to know what they are doing. This is particularly true for Smyth in the case of Tallaght, with his company already controlling a portion of the shopping centre development.

There is also the small matter of history, which in this case dates back to the dark days of the early 1990s. Guess who acted as a solicitor in the original construction of the property? None other than Smyth himself - now that's maturity.

Sky's the limit at Deauville

Former Knock airport executive Desmond O'Flynn has landed at yet another regional airport - only this time it's the altogether more swish destination of Deauville, the Normandy resort where fashionable Parisians and Sir Anthony O'Reilly head every summer to do whatever it is they do on their holidays.

O'Flynn has a job on his hands. While Deauville may be the "lady of the French coast", its airport is a bit of a Cinderella. Between private jets and charters, it could barely muster 150,000 passengers last year, less than one-quarter of the 621,000 who came to Knock.

This is despite a 2,500m runway that can take all but the biggest jets. O'Flynn says that both it and the terminal need attention, but declares that he is determined to start regular services between Deauville and Ireland, Britain and the rest of Europe in the near future.

As someone who was for a long time responsible for marketing Knock, he presumably knows what the task ahead involves. Pilgrims offer a potential market and one that he is already familiar with: the nearby town of Lisieux is France's second most important pilgrimage site after Lourdes.

Another is at the opposite end of the spectrum, gambling. Deauville is a centre for thoroughbred breeding and racing (its August racing festival is a more restrained eg, duller, equivalent of Galway) and the town itself has a number of big casinos, some of which play host to poker classics and similar events. Talk about a place that has it all . . .

US multinationals' Irish units may face taxing questions

Pity the nation. A legion of US multinationals in the Republic repatriated billions of dollars in 2005 after George W Bush introduced a tax break designed to foster employment in the US. That Bush labelled his legislation the American Jobs Creation Act said much about his objectives.

Now comes news, courtesy of the New York Times, that many participants in the scheme actually cut thousands of jobs at home while availing of generous tax breaks. Some $300 billion (€218 billion) was repatriated by 100 groups, saving $90 billion in taxes.

Pfizer repatriated $36 billion, while laying off 8,000 staff last year and preparing for another 10,000 job cuts. Eli Lilly and Schering-Plough also repatriated billions while laying off thousands. Hewlett-Packard sent back $14.5 billion, but laid off 14,500 staff.

Each group has operations in the Republic, but it is difficult to determine from their public filings whether their Irish units made special dividends. What is certain, however, is that numerous other groups in Ireland made use of the initiative by making special dividends to their parent organisations.

With the US Internal Revenue Service looking anew at US multinationals' use of overseas operations to minimise tax on their profits, it can only be a matter of time before their attention turns again to Irish shores. Busy times ahead for tax lawyers.