The former Irish Dairy Board, recently re-branded as Ornua, has announced a 10 percent increase in sales during 2014 to more than €2.3bn, and a 23 percent increase in pre-tax profits - rising to €28.1m.
Operating margins on these global sales remained at a very tight 0.75 percent.
Ornua, which itself is a co-operative owned by many of the country’s co-operative dairy and food producing companies, says it continued to invest in new manufacturing and distribution facilities around the world in advance of the ending of milk quotas and an expected 50 percent increase in Irish dairy output.
These investments included the opening of a new food ingredients facility in Wisconsin, the purchase of cheese manufacturing and food ingredients facilities in Spain and the UK respectively and the placing of 35 new marketing specialists on the ground in key export markets.
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In the wake of survey results yesterday that showed more than 50 percent of Irish SME websites are not mobile enabled, and are not designed to be accessed from phones and tablets, comes news this morning that Google plans to penalise websites that don’t have this capability.
The world’s most popular search engine plans immediately to update its secret algorithms, to rank sites during searches that are mobile friendly and to relegate sites that don’t meet its mobile criteria.
Ironically, the EU, which this week accused Google of abusing its dominance in online search, is one of the organisations likely to be impacted by the changes.
An online text provided by Google revealed that the EU’s Europa website was not mobile friendly, its text was too small, links too closely grouped and had content that spilled over on mobile screens.
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Some downsizing had been signalled when the company reported annual losses of about €2bn last month due to the sharp drop in oil prices and delays in bringing some of its key properties in Africa into production.
The departing Dublin staff, many of whom are highly skilled geologists and other members of its exploration team, were informed by the company last week, according to the Irish Times.
The Tullow share price which had plummeted in value over the past year as oil prices fell has risen by more than 40 percent to 400p in recent weeks due to takeover speculation in the industry after Shell’s bid for BG Group.
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IBM, the world’s largest technology services company, reported a 12 percent fall in first quarter revenues, to $2.33bn, the 12th successive such quarterly fall.
Revenues were lower principally because of the impact of the strong dollar – IBM generates half its income outside the US – and its ongoing transition from the manufacture and servicing of computer hardware to security software and cloud-based services.
The IBM share price closed more than 3 percent higher at $166 per share last night as the results were stronger than expected and the group seems to be achieving vey solid growth in its new cloud services.
It generated $7.7bn in total cloud revenue over the past twelve months, up sharply from the previous year.
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The European Central Bank wants the Central Bank of Ireland to accelerate its selling off of sovereign bonds that it acquired when Anglo Irish Bank was liquidated.
The comments come in the ECB's 2014 annual report and mirror a statement in the same report in the previous year.
The Central Bank has speed up plans to dispose of these €25bn in long-term bonds - but the rate at which it is doing so will be unclear until the bank publishes its annual report in May.
