independent

Friday 24 May 2013

Moran's assets revalued at €1.1bn after takeover

Recent purchase of Bewleys chain ‘will drive hotel group’s turnover to €170m’

Tom Moran at The Red Cow Inn, the landmark hostelry beside the 'Mad Cow' roundabout, which he bought for e1m in 1988 in 'a moment of inspiration'

The Dublin-based Moran Hotel Group has had its assets revalued at €1.1bn after the recent purchase of six Bewleys hotels.

The family-owned group now boasts 10 hotels in the UK and Ireland, after paying up to €700m for the Bewleys hotels last December.

Family holding company T&S Taverns also includes five bars, reflecting founder Tom Moran's beginnings as a London publican.

Accounts just filed for T&S show its assets were revalued by just over €100m during the year ended January 2007, delivering total assets of €266m.

"The revaluation was done towards the end of that financial year, but there was no material change when we had it done again last November," said Pat Power, finance director with the Moran Group.

"We did a revaluation again recently and as of last week our assets stand at €1.1bn."

The 2007 accounts also show a €4m jump in turnover to €34m, delivering virtually unchanged pretax profits of €1.78m.

Mr Power said he was "absolutely pleased" with day-to-day trading in 2007 but stressed that the figures looked much better for the year ending January 2008.

"We'd have done a turnover of close to €40m this year and you'd be talking about ebitda [earnings] in excess of €10m," he added.

The addition of the six Bewleys hotels, which passed into the Moran group's hands last Friday, will drive group turnover to €170m for the year ending January 2009, Mr Power said.

He added that he didn't fear the current economic woes would adversely impact on this year's trading.

"We're already two months into the 2009 trading year, so far [our business in] Cork is up 15pc, Dublin is up 8pc and the UK is up 11pc," he said.

"We wouldn't have bought the Bewleys hotels if we weren't optimistic about the outlook."

The Moran group had racked up accumulated profits of close to €20m by January 2007, while staff numbers stood at 535, up 84 year-on-year.

Portfolio

Moran has made a name for himself as one of the most ambitious hoteliers on the Irish circuit, assembling a pre-Bewleys hotel portfolio of Dublin's 123-room Red Cow Inn, Cork's 109-room Silver Springs Moran Hotel and the 116-room Crown Moran and 116-room Chiswick Moran Hotel in London.

The hotelier's current to-do list includes building Ireland's tallest hotel on the Red Cow site.

The project's blueprints include a 17-storey structure with a 500-bedroom hotel, conference centre, and nightclub spread out over almost 60,000 square metres.

The publicity-shy Limerick man has made no secret of his desire to have his seven children follow him into the family business, and several of them have already joined the hotel group.

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