Oyster Group, which comprises the business activities of Dublin-based telecoms-to-property entrepreneur Emmet Memery, increased turnover in 2006 by 76 per cent to €60 million.
Most of this growth is attributable to Mr Memery's mobile phone operations. Turnover at Cellular Services, the biggest independent agent in Ireland for Vodafone, rose from €29 million in 2005 to €48 million last year.
Cellular focuses on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and accounts for 20 per cent of Vodafone's business in that segment of the market. Its profits last year rose by 17 per cent to €2.1 million and it has 70,000 SME customers. In addition, Mr Memery also owns 23 mobile phone retail outlets around the State under the Zoocom brand. Cellular and Zoocom will shortly be rebranded under the Oyster name. In total, Oyster issued 200,000 handsets to customers last year.
Mr Memery is now aiming to become a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) in 2008. This would involve him buying airtime off an existing operator at wholesale rates and then reselling it to customers. "Our preferred partner going forward would be Vodafone and we've already had outline discussions with the company," Mr Memery said. "Our target market would be SMEs." Tesco recently announced plans to launch an MVNO in conjunction with O2. Mr Memery said group turnover in 2007 would "easily" hit €100 million. "We're already comfortably ahead of our targets in the mobile phone business," he said.
Mr Memery's activities also include wine distribution, bonded warehousing, timber milling in Russia and Latvia, catering, property development in Ireland and abroad, and vineyards in South Africa. The group directly employs 94 staff. Most of these businesses will this year be rebranded as Oyster. The exceptions are the chain of Lemongrass restaurants, in which he holds a majority stake and which are operated by franchisees, and Bravo! an event-management company in which he recently took a 30 per cent stake for €300,000.
"Lemongrass is an established brand in its own right and it doesn't make sense to change that," he said. "Bravo is an investment." Mr Memery recently expanded in Latvia, paying €3.5 million for site in Riga, where he hopes to build a five-storey block comprising offices and 250 apartments.
