LAURA SLATTERYperuses the week in business
THE NUMBERS
19
- Percentage drop in sales of spirits in the Republic in the first quarter of 2009, as shoppers opted for greater sobriety or cheaper cross-Border varieties of vodka, gin and whiskey.
$75-$80
- The "fair price" for a barrel of oil, according to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter. Prices currently hover around the $60 mark.
QUOTES OF THE WEEK
"The idea that countries don't go bust is a joke."
- Economic historian and Financial Times columnist Niall Ferguson places Ireland at the top of the list of prime candidates that he expects will prove him right.
"That this doom and gloom about our industry has largely gone unanswered is, to me, the most bizarre case of willful self-mutilation ever in the annals of industry."
- Rumours of the death of print newspapers have been greatly exaggerated, Independent News & Media chief executive Gavin O'Reilly tells the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) Power of Print conference in Barcelona.
"I would say our traditional model is bankrupt, unviable, finished."
- David Montgomery, chief executive of European newspaper group Mecom, takes a somewhat harsher line.
GOOD WEEK
Virgin Atlantic
Virgin Atlantic 1, other airlines 0. Mere days after British Airways reported a £400 million loss for 2008, Virgin has arrived with a pretax profit of £68 million, double its previous year's effort, after its number of business and first-class passengers held up better than its rivals and it flew its planes on fuel hedged in 2006 at a pre-spike price. But despite gaining market share, Virgin chief executive Steve Ridgway was not exactly high on success, warning that no airlines will make money this year.
Everyone's favourite social networking site has been in the marketplace again this week, offloading a 1.96 per cent stake in the business for $200 million to Russian internet firm Digital Sky Technology (DST) in a deal that values the site at a tidy $10 billion. (Of course, two years ago, Facebook sold a 1.6 per cent stake to Microsoft for $240 million, but that's deflation for you.) DST can now add Facebook to its portfolio of social networking sites, which includes such (Russian) household names as Odnoklassniki.ru and Vkontakte.ru.
BAD WEEK
GM
The saga of General Motors, estimated to account for 1 per cent of the US economy, has moved closer to Chapter 11 bankruptcy after the company failed to strike an agreement with its bondholders to swap bond debt for GM shares. The bankruptcy will result in a carve-up of the Detroit-based GM, with the US government likely to take a stake of as much as 70 per cent in the company, which employs 235,000 people worldwide. Meanwhile, the fate of its European operations, Opel and Vauxhall, lies largely in the hands of the German government and the two interested bidders, Fiat and Magna.
Abbey, Alliance & Leicester, Bradford & Bingley
Three British banking brands have been swept to the scrapheap by one of the credit crunch's principal refuse collectors, the Spanish financial giant Santander - now the second biggest banking group in the world after HSBC. Riding the wave of recognition from sponsorship of last season's Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton, Santander is rebranding Abbey, which it bought in 2004, alongside credit crunch casualties Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley, to form 1,300 branches of Santander. The bank has no Irish holdings - yet.
