Current Account: The announcement earlier this week that Elan had settled its lawsuit with King Pharmaceuticals, and the sale of Skelaxin and Sonata will now go ahead on revised terms, has lifted one uncertainty hanging over the company.
While question marks remain over the outcome of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) inquiry and the class action law suits against the company and investors are still awaiting further updates on its pipeline, it has put the company back on a far sounder footing.
Following the agreement, Merrion is putting a sum-of-the-parts valuation on the company of $7.30 per share, well above Wednesday's closing price of $4.70.
Company broker Davy is even more upbeat, putting an asset-based valuation of $8 to $10 on the shares, assuming the outcome of the SEC investigation is benign.
The quandary now facing Irish fund managers is whether or not it is again time to include the stock in their portfolios.
With a market capitalisation of nearly €1.37 billion, the company is once again among the top 10 on the Irish Stock Exchange, making it difficult to ignore.
But many institutional investors have not yet gotten over last year's share price collapse, which left them badly burnt. A case of once bitten, twice shy?
IAWS downplays mad cow factor in Canada
Has Philip Lynch's luck started to run out? The IAWS boss must certainly have reason to wonder. No sooner has anti-French sentiment in the US started to wane than mad cow disease appears in Canada.
IAWS is adamant that sales of its artisan breads in the US have not been hit by anger over Jacques Chirac's attitude towards the US-led invasion of Iraq. But at the same time it's hard to see how the whole "freedom fries" palaver could have been good for the sales of anything vaguely French, never mind breads branded "La Brea".
The mad cow disease outbreak in Canada is also being down played. IAWS has a joint venture with Tim Hortons, which provides breads for various sandwiches sold by the Wendys-owned chain. But as Merrion Capital points out, of the six "lunchtime sandwiches" sold by Tim Hortons, only one has beef in it.
This must be good news for the punters who bought shares recently. There have been two placements recently of shares by the eponymous co-op. According to a briefing given by the company to ABN Amro, the sellers were the nominees who hold 8 per cent of IAWS on behalf of the co-op, rather than the co-op itself which has a 17 per cent stake.
The co-op apparently is not a seller but obviously has no control over the nominees, which makes it hard to predict what they might have in mind.
Ryanair double whammy
The corporate chutzpah of Ryanair knows no bounds. So it was with no great surprise that Ryanair has launched a text message service that informs subscribers of the best deals on select routes. Txt&Fly lets you sign up to receive SMS messages when fares drop to your favourite destinations. All very nice - as its website amply demonstrates, Ryanair has always been a front-runner in using technology to the benefit of consumers well before everyone else cops on.
And it's a smart idea - let the punters know immediately that prices have plummeted for the next few days on the Dublin-Malaga route, and the punters will hightail it over to Ryanair.com and book, or make an immediate call on the mobile to the reservation desk.
The only problem is that Ryanair wants to charge YOU to sign up for the new service - at €5 (or £3.49) for three months of "unlimited" text alerts. In other words, they want you, the customer, to pay for a service that should bring them, Ryanair, more passengers. As we said, pure chutzpah.
