LAURA SLATTERY peruses the week in business
THE NUMBERS
195 million
- orders that drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline has received for doses of the H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine, which it says will be available in September
£3 billion
sum that GlaxoSmithKline is expected to make between now and the end of the year from the vaccine and from its anti-viral drug Relenza
400 million
- units of Tamiflu that pharma rival Roche expects to sell in 2010.
15
- percentage absenteeism rate that businesses should be prepared for due to the H1N1 pandemic, according to the Health Service Executive.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK I
"The first thing is that they acknowledge that this pandemic is real and is most likely to get worse and that also it will impact on their businesses."
- It's time for businesses to appoint a "pandemic tsar" to co-ordinate their response to the crisis, says the HSE's national director of communications Paul Connors
QUOTE OF THE WEEK II
"The financial equivalent of Chernobyl"
- Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat economic guru, says that the British banks are spreading radioactivity through economy.
GOOD WEEK
Pritt Stick
Everyone's favourite portable glue stick celebrated its fortieth anniversary this week, according to manufacturers Henkel, so that's 40 years of children ruining their own fun by twisting their Pritt Sticks around so much that the glue bit wound up falling out of the stick bit. The adhesive, some one million of which are sold in Ireland every year, was the brainchild of Henkel researcher Dr Wolfgang Dierichs, who got the idea from watching a woman apply lipstick on an airplane. History has not recorded whether the lipstick lady got a royalty for providing such inspiration, how she felt about being so closely observed by Dr Wolfgang, or indeed how Frau Wolfgang felt about it.
Burger King
Everyone's favourite portable glue stick celebrated its fortieth anniversary this week, according to manufacturers Henkel, so that's 40 years of children ruining their own fun by twisting their Pritt Sticks around so much that the glue bit wound up falling out of the stick bit. The adhesive, some one million of which are sold in Ireland every year, was the brainchild of Henkel researcher Dr Wolfgang Dierichs, who got the idea from watching a woman apply lipstick on an airplane. History has not recorded whether the lipstick lady got a royalty for providing such inspiration, how she felt about being so closely observed by Dr Wolfgang, or indeed how Frau Wolfgang felt about it.
BAD WEEK
Coffee snobs
In a move that will seriously confuse anti-chain consumers who live and breathe for morning pick-me-ups that are authentically artisan, the cafe franchise Starbucks is ditching the unfashionably common Starbucks brand from a number of its US stores. Each of the "Starbucks by stealth" stores will be given a "local" name, such as Seattle's 13th Avenue Coffee and Tea, with the new names designed to give caffeine-dependent commuters a dollop of faux-community feeling along with their appreciably more bohemian Americanos. But all revenues from these undercover franchises will go straight to that alleged evil destroyer of independent coffee houses, Starbucks.
Private equity Beatle fans
The "King of Pop" is not yet cold in his brainless grave, the number of DNA tests that will be required to establish his true number of heirs has yet to be quantified and official offspring "Blanket" still thinks daddy is on holiday. But none of this will stop the private equity vultures from circling Michael Jackson's most valuable asset: his 50 per cent share in Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which he snapped up in the 1980s to the dismay of Paul McCartney. However, Sony now has the option to buy a further 25 per cent in the publishing canon, which controls most of the Beatles' back catalogue, while the executors to Jackson's estate insist that the remaining 25 per cent stake is "not for sale".
