You know things are bad when even the supermarket discounters can’t make ends meet. Aldi, the German retailer, is blaming increased competition and the slump in consumer spending for a €66.5m loss after tax last year in the UK and Ireland, The Sunday Tribune reports.
The previous year Aldi made a profit of €84.4m but it was doom and gloom last year despite growth in turnover, stores and staff numbers.
This week’s Sunday newspapers invented a whole new genre of misery lit with the main theme being the sheer scale of the economic crises in which we find ourselves. The analogy doesn’t end there: the coverage does tend to induce page-turning and the ending doesn’t look pretty.
There ain’t much good news out there at the moment but The Sunday Times details four reasons for consumers to be cheerful. Increased competition is bringing the cost of bills down for people who make a little effort to switch provider.
Irish millionaires have lost confidence in the economy and fear their wealth will be destroyed by a combination of unpredictable investment returns and higher taxes, The Sunday Times reports.
Former O’Brien’s sandwich man Brody Sweeney was once feted at conference and business meetings as one of Ireland’s most successful entrepreneurs. Now, he told The Sunday Independent, he is lauded instead as an “example of perseverance in business”.
Times is tough it seems for the boys in the pin-striped suits. Dublin’s stockbrokers aren’t sure where their next bottle of Dom Perignon is coming from these days. A flurry of legal actions over corporate deals gone wrong could see the biggest ever consolidation in the sector in Ireland.
Senior civil servants could lose their entitlement to credit cards under a new scheme to replace them with lower limit alternatives, according to The Sunday Business Post.
Corporate insolvencies could rise by 30% to more than 2,000 this year and personal insolvencies could “explode” this year according to Business Pro, the publisher of Stubbs Gazette.
Hays, the recruitment firm, says almost 60% of accountancy firms plan to take on more staff this year, according to reports in the Sunday Tribune and the Sunday Times.
A survey of business leaders in the Sunday Independent showed that a massive majority (84 per cent) believe that the Irish economy will start to pick up by the end of 2012 at the latest. But a substantial number of those polled – 33 per cent – predicted that the lift would kick in sooner,
You can forget about having any thoughts of reaching your destination any quicker – certainly not by road anyway. The National Roads Authority (NRA) has told The Sunday Times it doesn’t know what funding it will be getting in future and will only be able to start a small number of projects on the national network this year and next.