BUSINESS AT BB's Coffee and Muffins group in Ireland increased strongly in 2007, chairman Kieran Walshe has told The Irish Times, although turnover at its British outlets was stagnant.
The company now has more than 180 outlets in Ireland and Britain. The group, which specialises in cafés in shopping centres and has its headquarters in Limerick, has transformed itself into a franchising business in recent years and aims to open about 20 new outlets a year.
"In the UK we would be nervous about expanding aggressively, but we're still expanding," Mr Walshe said. "The business in Ireland is good and we're still opening stores."
Mr Walshe and Dublin businessman David Sykes are the principals in the group holding company, TBL Holdings Ltd, which is based in London. The company secretary is Helen Malone, who is based in the Isle of Man.
Mr Sykes is an adviser to entrepreneur Denis O'Brien.
The latest available accounts for BB's Coffee and Muffins Holdings Ltd, also based in London, show the group had a turnover of £7.6 million (€9.67 million) and pretax profits of £701,524 in the year to September 2006.
This compares with a turnover of £9.5 million and a pretax profit of £1.7 million the previous year.
Mr Walshe said the fall in turnover and profit was related to a number of factors associated with the conversion of the group into a franchise operation as against a store-owning operation.
Also, he said, the group had been turned around from a loss-making to a profit-making company and this had had implications for the treatment of goodwill and accumulated losses.
The group owns the BB's Coffee and Muffins franchise in Europe, which was bought from its original Australian owners for more than £1 million in the mid-1990s.
Mr Walshe said the group's Irish earnings before interest, tax and amortisation was €1.2 million in 2006 and €1.7 million in 2007.
The group has 30 outlets in Ireland and more than 150 in Britain. Although it has the franchise for the BB's Coffee and Muffins brand for all of Europe, Mr Walshe said that, for the moment, the group had "sufficient opportunities in our own neck of the woods".
