Planet Business

Compiled by Laura Slattery.

THE NUMBERS

19 and 17 -ages of the two Limerick brothers, Patrick and John Collinson, who have sold their fledgling software company Auctomatic in a multimillion deal, which has made Patrick, the elder of the brothers and a former Young Scientist of the Year, a millionaire.

300 -approximate number of western bankers and businessmen who travelled to Bhutan last year to hear human calculators called "tsips" use a 250-page, handscripted goatskin volume called the "Mopai" as a financial forecasting tool.

€992,000 -Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary will not receive a cent more than this modest six-figure sum in his pay package this year, after the airline announced it would freeze the remuneration of 36 senior executives in 2008.

$460 billion -Wall Street banks, brokerages and hedge funds may have lost this much money from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market - four times the amount already disclosed, according to Goldman Sachs.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"The 'relationship' between Ms L and Mr H is to be checked - the two are very cosy with each other. Whenever Mr H is on the till, he draws a heart on her receipt. When they said goodbye at the cash register on Thursday, they came very close. Unfortunately, I couldn't see exactly if Mr H gave her a kiss on the cheek, but it looked that way to me."

-an extract from the "Lidl Stasi" reports of a private investigator hired by the retailer, which used hidden cameras and microphones to spy on its staff in western Germany and make a note of their love lives, finances and toilet habits, according to news magazine Stern.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK 2

"He hasn't sold Canary Wharf yet, but he'll get there."

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Alan Sugar gives a characteristically blunt 12-month assessment of Simon Ambrose, last year's winner of The Apprentice, who is busy working among the real estate "sharks" as the Amstrad boss begins his search for a new employee.

GOOD WEEK

TiffanyThe jeweller is capturing the welcome, recession-offsetting trade of "dollar tourists" - shoppers who cross the Atlantic to exploit enticing currency exchange rates and pick up something shiny in its iconic New York store. Tiffany, which plans to open a store in Dublin (expected to be within a Brown Thomas "luxury room"), saw its international sales sparkle in the final quarter of 2007, rising 21 per cent.

Paddy Power Not only did a rank outsider win the Irish Grand National, minimising payouts, but the betting firm has found a way to capitalise on what it calls "meltdown fears" and is now taking bets at odds of 9/2 that the US Federal Reserve will be forced to slash interest rates to zero or below in 2008. "It's been all doom and gloom lately with our punters . . . Anything is possible!" said Paddy Power spokeswoman Sharon McHugh.

BAD WEEK

The Square MileOffice development in the City of London financial district will now be as much as 50 per cent lower than expected this time last year, say forecasters at CB Richard Ellis and Jones Lang LaSalle. But the credit crunch has taken out more than just a few cranes. Civil behaviour has also gone askew, with traders' frustrations thought to be responsible for an upsurge in violent crime and street rowdiness - including attacks on prostitutes.

US consumersWindow shopping is all the rage in the US, as consumers keep their credit cards and their loose change in their tightly zipped wallets. Consumer spending is expected to crawl to the slowest rate since 1991, while economic confidence has dipped to the lowest level since December 1973, when the Nixon government was busy being rocked by the Watergate scandal and an oil crisis was in full swing.