Norman Crowley’s decarbonisation business, Cool Planet Group Limited, received €4.1 million in taxpayer funding from Enterprise Ireland (EI) late last year, new filings show.
Information contained in a European Commission state aid register shows that EI gave the funding in August of last year.
Cool Planet provides a variety of services to companies looking to decarbonise their operations, offering consultancy services, software and engineering services to a wide range of sectors, including manufacturing, mining, pharmaceuticals, shipping and others.
Crowley told The Irish Times that the funds were a mixture of grants for research and development and employment grants to support 150 jobs.
He added, “Enterprise Ireland have been a brilliant partner to Cool Planet over the years and we’re excited to be working with them on the creation of another 150 jobs.”
He said that 50 of the jobs had already been created in 2023.
The most recent accounts for Cool Planet Group show that the company had a substantial rise in revenue in 2022, thanks to the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions after the pandemic.
The company had revenue of €13.7 million in 2022, up 150 per cent compared with the previous year’s figure of €5.4 million.
Cool Planet had a pretax loss for the year of €4.9 million, down from the previous year’s loss of €6.2 million. Its accumulated losses at the end of 2022 stood at €28.4 million.
The company’s directors noted in the accounts that at the end of that year the group had assets of €23.7 million, liabilities of €22.7 million, and a net asset position of €1 million, which was slightly down from the previous year’s net asset position of €6.6 million.
Some of that movement in assets was due to a reduction in the value of cash on the company’s balance sheet, which was reduced by €3.6 million from €5.1 million to €1.4 million.
Cool Planet had 90 employees and a wage bill of €6.6 million at the end of 2022, up from a wage bill of €4.3 million the year before.
The directors stated in the accounts they “consider the result for the year and the year end position to be satisfactory”.
They continued that the easing of Covid-19 restrictions across the world “has allowed the business to grow and expand globally as planned” and that “revenues continue to grow and combined with further investment into the business and the significant drive in the decarbonisation space, the directors believe the group is in prime position for significant growth over the next 3 to 5 years”.
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