McAFEE IRELAND Ltd, the Irish subsidiary of the US computer security firm, which announced the creation of 120 jobs in Cork last week, had a turnover of €323 million and pretax profits of €14.1 million last year, according to accounts just filed with the Companies Registration Office.
This compares to a turnover of €297 million and pretax profits of €21.6 million in 2007.
The accounts show that McAfee Ireland had retained losses of €71.8 million and a deficit in shareholders funds of €67.5 million.
The company’s auditors, Deloitte, note that because there is an excess of liabilities over assets, the convening of an extraordinary general meeting of the company may be required. The auditors’ report is dated September 17th last.
McAfee would have been liable to pay corporation tax of €1.76 million on its pretax profits. It utilised tax losses of €1.9 million and other allowable expenses to reduce its tax bill to €175,929. In 2007, it paid corporation taxes of €664,800.
For both years the accounts show that employment grants of €108,000 were received.
Revenues of €229.4 million were generated from EU countries during the period in question with non-EU countries contributing €94.3 million.
Cork is McAfee’s headquarters for its operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and is also the point through which all orders for the EMEA and Asia Pacific regions are processed.
Functions carried out include finance, procurement, localisation, order processing and customer care for its network of resellers.
The company provides a range of security software to deal with viruses, spam, malware and to filter web traffic. It sells both to businesses and home users.
The accounts show that an average of 163 staff were employed during 2008, up from 144 in 2007. Despite this, the bill for wages, social welfare contributions and pension costs fell from €9.1 million in 2007 to €7.4 million last year. A spend of €7.3 million was incurred on product research, up from €5.9 million the previous year.
Last Wednesday McAfee announced it would create an additional 120 sales jobs in Cork with support from IDA Ireland.
David Quantrell, the company’s president for the EMEA region, said he was confident the jobs would be filled by January.
“We’ve done a lot of pre-work on profiling the kind of skills that are around,” said Mr Quantrell. “I think in Ireland in general there is a good technical skills base that has been built up over the last 10-15 years.”
He told The Irish Timesthat 11 sites in Europe had been considered before Cork was ultimately chosen for the investment.
McAfee Ireland is a single-member private limited company.
It is owned by McAfee European Holdings Limited, which is registered in Valletta, the capital of Malta. The ultimate parent company is McAfee Inc, a Californian company quoted on the New York Stock Exchange. It has more than 5,500 staff and had revenues of $1.6 billion in 2008. Formerly know as Network Associates, it claims to be the world’s largest dedicated security software firm.
