It was the year that the drawn-out Apple tax case finally came to a conclusion as the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) confirmed that the European Commission had been correct in deciding back in 2016 that the iPhone maker had received illegal state aid from Ireland and must pay the State €13 billion in back taxes, plus interest.
Outgoing EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who persisted with the case, would tell reporters hours after the final ruling that she had broken down in tears when she learned the outcome.
The €14 billion pot, including interest, held in escrow since 2018, took centre stage in the recent general election, featuring in all party manifestos as they pledged to spend the windfall on everything from housing to the green transition. The case had no bearing on Apple’s own share price, however, as it spiralled to new heights, making it the first business to beach the $3.5 trillion (€3.3 trillion) level.
Bulmers ciders’ parent C&C was rattled in June when the drinks group restated three years of its earnings due to accounting errors, resulting in the company taking an underlying charge of €5 million and parting way with its chief executive of just over a year. C&C subsequently said that it will pay a €1.3 million settlement to the former CEO, Patrick McMahon. He had succeeded David Forde, who quit in May 2023 after the group incurred a one-off charge of €25 million related to the delayed implementation of a new business management system at one of its UK units.
Corre Energy, the second-last company to float on the Irish stock market, in 2021, plunged 95 per cent this year as the storage developer for renewable energy required two emergency cash injections from large shareholders as it searched for a long-term investor and saw members of its original board, including its founders, depart. The Irish-run but Dutch-based company said in October that it was now prioritising capital expenditure on two projects in Germany, with the first of these on track for a final investment decision in 2026, after its previously most advanced project in the Netherlands encountered permit challenges.
DCC, the Dublin-based but London-listed distribution and services conglomerate founded in 1976 by businessman Jim Flavin, moved to abandon its conglomerate roots in November as it set out on a path to sell its healthcare and technology units to focus on its fast-growing energy division. It follows the disposals over the past decade of DCC’s food and beverage assets, including the Robert Roberts tea and coffee and Kelkin health foods brand, the frozen and chilled foods logistics business, and recycling and waste management arm. Analysts estimate the healthcare and technology units could fetch a total of more than £3 billion (€3.63 billion), with the cash generated set to be returned to investors, most likely by way of share buy-backs. CEO Donal Murphy is hoping the narrowing of DCC’s focus will turn investors’ attention to how its energy division, which still earns most of its money selling fossil fuels to households, is increasingly targeting the green energy transition.
The European Central Bank (ECB) and other big central banks remained centre stage during 2024 as they began to reduce interest rates following a series of hikes in recent years in a war against inflation. The ECB cut its key deposit rate a total of one percentage point spread across four quarter-point reductions since June. The rate-setting body for the euro zone expects inflation across the region to be back at its 2 per cent target next year, down from a peak of 10.6 per cent in October 2023.
Wall Street in New York lured more Iseq heavyweights this year, with Flutter Entertainment, parent of Paddy Power and Betfair, delisting from Euronext Dublin, the Irish Stock Exchange operator, in January. It was followed in July by Smurfit Kappa, which moved its main quotation to the US on completion of its merger with cardboard box-making rival Westrock to form Smurfit Westrock. CRH had quit the Irish market in late 2023.
Greencore more than doubled in value in 2024 following a tumultuous eight years, as its CEO of two years, Dalton Philips, steered a recovery for the maker of sandwiches to ready-made Italian meals for big supermarkets. In the process, Philips backed out of low-yielding contracts and leaned into trends such as the “joy of missing out” to push dine-in meal kits to those happy to forgo going out. Greencore’s earnings for the year to September topped the company’s own guidance, even after it had raised its forecasts three times during the period. Philips also signalled that the group is preparing to get back out on the acquisitions trail for the first time in years.
Harland & Wolff, the Belfast-based shipbuilder that produced the Titanic, collapsed into administration in September, with insolvency practitioners at Teneo assigned to oversee the process, after it failed to find new funding to stay afloat. The company’s AIM-listed shares in London were suspended in August and ultimately delisted in October. The administrators entered exclusive talks the same month to sell the business to Spanish state-owned shipbuilder Navartia. A deal was agreed before Christmas.
Ires Reit, the Republic’s largest private residential landlord, reached a truce with activist investor Vision Capital in April by offering two board seats to nominees of the Canadian firm as the group continued a strategic review into its options as the share price remained under pressure. Ires hired property industry veteran Eddie Byrne as its CEO that same month, succeeding Margaret Sweeney. The board concluded in August that a substantive sale of the group or its assets – which Vision had been seeking – was not in Ires’s best interests, though it committed to a “capital recycling programme”, selling off noncore apartment assets to unlock some value for investors. The outcome has yet to excite stock market investors. Ires’s shares fell over 17 per cent this year.
Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) shares were in the doldrums this year as the US pharma and medtech giant continued to add to a settlement offer aimed at ending thousands of ovarian cancer lawsuits linked to its talcum powder. J&J moved in September to wrap the $9 billion (€8.54 billion) settlement in a pre-packaged chapter 11 bankruptcy of a unit, called Red River Talc, in Texas. A federal judge will decide on the validity of this route – which would end almost all cases – early next year.
Kingspan was in focus in September as a long-awaited final UK report on the Grenfell tower disaster in London. The company’s Kooltherm K15 insulation board had been used for 5 per cent of the insulation behind the building’s cladding. The Cavan-based group didn’t know that its product had been used in the development and the report found that insulation was not the main cause of the fire that claimed the lives of 72 people. However, the chairman of the inquiry, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, was scathing of the group for falsely claiming that a form of K15 had successfully passed fire tests that allowed it to be used on the external walls of high-rise buildings in the first place. It “knowingly created a false market” for the insulation, he said.
Luxury goods groups from LVMH Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy and Kehring, owner of brands including Gucci, Alexander McQueen and Balenciaga, to Swatch, whose watch brands span Omega to Longines, saw their shares slide this year amid uncertainty around demand out of the key Chinse and Japanese markets. Management consulting firm Bain & Company estimates that global sales of personal luxury goods will fall 2 per cent this year, with economic uncertainty shrinking the industry’s customer base. It reckons China, which had seen a sustained boom for years amid a growing middle class, is on track for a 22 per cent sales slump in 2024.
CRH selected chief financial officer Jim Mintern to succeed Albert Manifold, who had pursued record levels of deal-making over the past 11 years to move the traditional seller of cement and other base materials into full-scale construction services, as of the end of 2024. Manifold earned $13.2 million (€12.5 million) last year and CRH said in its latest annual report that its “compensation structures will evolve to more closely align” with practices in the US, where it moved its main stock market listing last year.
Nvidia, the undisputed darling of Wall Street as the global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) computing, saw its shares soar over 190 per cent over the course of 2024 – pushing its market value to $3.43 trillion (€3.3 trillion) – as it continued to deliver blowout earnings. Its stock rose at a multiple of the pace of the other members of the so-called magnificent seven, which also include Facebook’s parent, Meta, Tesla, Microsoft, Google owner Alphabet, Apple and Amazon.
Japanese camera giant Olympus was in focus for all the wrong reasons in October when its German CEO, Stefan Kaufmann, was booted out amid allegations of the purchase of illegal drugs. Kaufman, who had joined a European unit of Olympus 21 years ago, was subsequently indicted by prosecutors, suspected of having taken possession of cocaine and the synthetic drug MDMA multiple times in Tokyo in 2023.
Irish financier Paul Coulson’s Ardagh saw its riskiest bonds trade at below 20 cent on the euro during 2024 as investors became increasingly concerned about the glass and metal containers group’s $12.4 billion (€11.7 billion) debt pile – especially as the outlook for its glass bottles unit continued to weaken. The multinational glass and metal containers manufacturer for the drinks industry, built up by Coulson over the past 25 years, continues to weigh how to reduce its borrowings. The price at which its most-junior – or subordinated – bonds have been trading indicates that holders of these notes expect they will have to write off much of what they are owed as part of restructuring. Coulson owns about 36 per cent of the business, which traces its roots back to the now long-defunct Irish Glass Bottle Company.
CEO quitting and firings hit record levels globally in 2024, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the international firm that assists “transitioning” executives find new roles. Big CEO exits include Laxman Narasimhan from Starbucks, who was ousted by his board in August after 17 months, Mark Schneider at Nestlé, Dennis Muilenburg at Boeing, Pat Gelsinger at Intel and Carlos Tavares at Stellantis, the car-making group whose brands include Peugeot, Fiat and Jeep.
Reddit, the Californian social media company, made its long-anticipated stock market flotation on the Nasdaq in March in a deal that valued the business at $8.87 billion (€8.4 billion). The 19-year old company, popular for its member-led communities known as subreddits that span interest areas from world news to brain-rot memes, has seen its share price soar about 250 per cent since, helped by the posting its first-ever profit in the third quarter of this year, as a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature that translates English posts into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German drove user numbers higher.
Sterling became the surprise best-performing currency among those by G10 (group of 10 industrialised nations), following years of volatility that has seen it dubbed the British lira among other names, according to the Wall Street Journal. The pound rose as much as 5.2 per cent against the euro alone, as the Labour Party’s election victory in June lifted a lot of political uncertainty and the Bank of England trailed other big central banks in cutting interest rates. Still, that was nothing on the performance of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, which soared as much as 150 per cent – turbocharged in November by Donald Trump’s re-election as US president. The Republican has vowed to make the US the “crypto capital” of the world.
Elon Musk’s Tesla soared 29 per cent in the week of the Trump victory, pushing it above the $1 trillion (€950 billion) valuation mark amid hopes the president-elect’s highest-profile promoter on the campaign trail (who contributed more than $130 million to the cause) will see his companies get favourable treatment from the incoming administration. Still, China’s BYD overtook Tesla late last year as the world’s top seller of electric vehicles with its more affordable range. It also sped past Tesla in terms of overall revenues in the third quarter for the first time, helped by hybrid sales as well as battery-powered vehicles.
Italy’s second-largest bank, Unicredit, ruffled political and labour union feathers in Germany in September when it swooped in to snap up a 21 per cent stake in Frankfurt-based Commerzbank with a view to launching a takeover bid. While chancellor Olaf Scholz has been a big proponent of an EU banking union, he denounced the Italian manoeuvre as “an unfriendly attack”. Unicredit has since launched a €10 billion bid for domestic rival Banco BPM – and its CEO, Andrea Orcel, has indicated he is unlikely to make a move on Commerzbank at least until German elections are done and dusted in February following the unrelated collapse of Scholz’s government. Still, he has since upped the Commerzbank stake to 28 per cent.
Irish banker David Duffy led Virgin Money to a £2.9 billion (€3.5 billion) sale to fellow UK lender Nationwide Building Society at the end of September to create the second-largest mortgages and savings business in that market. The former AIB chief executive quit the Irish bank in 2015 for Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank Group (CYBG), then a subsidiary of National Australia Bank. He led CYBG through an IPO in early 2016 and into a merger two years later with Virgin Money. Duffy stepped down as Virgin’s CEO as the Nationwide tie-up was completed and is estimated to have secured a pay-day worth as much as £15.3 million (€18.3 million) through the sale of shares and stock options he held in the bank.
Walt Disney defeated a challenge to its board in April from activist investor and Brooklyn Beckham’s father-in-law, Nelson Peltz, handing a victory to CEO Bob Iger and ending one of the most expensive boardroom battles in history. The stock has rallied strongly in the past few months after the company reported better-than-expected results for its financial year to September, boosted by its streaming business and issued a rosier outlook than followers of the company had been used to in recent times.
French telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel set out on a path towards full ownership of Eir, as two US hedge funds began to exit their investment in the former Irish telecoms monopoly, in which debt market investors hold €1.35 billion of bonds. Firms belonging to Niel acquired 64.5 per cent of Eir in April 2018 in a deal that saw two of the company’s largest pre-existing investors, hedge funds run by New York firms Anchorage Capital and Davidson Kempner, roll most of their shares into a combined 35.5 per cent interest. It is understood that Davidson Kempner sold its 8.9 per cent holding in the business over the summer to Anchorage Capital. Anchorage began to gradually sell down the combined stake by participating in a share buyback by a holding company above Eir in October. Neil’s stake currently stands at about 69 per cent.
The market interest rate – or yield – on French 10-year government debt rose above those of crisis-scarred Greece for the first time in late November as Michel Barnier’s government limped towards collapse after he controversially used special powers to force through his budget without a vote. Marine Le Pen’s far-right grouping and the left-wing New Popular Front united in early December to force through a no-confidence motion in the former Brexit negotiator’s government. Greece, which emerged from a third international bailout in 2018, saw its creditworthiness upgraded to investment grade in late 2023 by S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings, following 13 years of junk status. Its economy has grown faster than the EU average over the past five years, its government is rapidly reprivatising banks that were rescued during the crisis and it is repaying chunks of its bailout loans ahead of schedule.
Zara owner, Inditex’s shares soared as much as 45 per cent in 2024, twice the pace of the wider European retail sector as its popular fashion ranges and nimble operations helped it cope better than some of its rivals with changing consumer demands. The group, which also owns the Massimo Dutti and Pull & Bear brands, has been quicker to adapt to fashion trends and potential headwinds than some of its rivals, thanks to its tightly managed supply chain, according to analysts. Investors are also keeping a close eye on Inditex’s ambitious expansion plans in the US, its second-largest market by sales, where it opened its first Zara store in 1989 and where its Massimo Dutti brand has made a tentative return recently after a previous foray into market failed.
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