It’s a story with a familiar ring to it. A successful Irish quoted company with a market-leading position – controlled by a patriarch from a Border county – watches its share price dwindle as investors flock to buy into the next big thing. Keen to get in on the action, the company decides to hive off part of the business and repackage it as something likely to appeal to investors transfixed by the new and novel. The impact on the share price is almost instantaneous, as is the collapse when the bubble bursts.
Neil McCann, the Louth-born chairman of Fyffes whose worldoffruit.com internet play imploded in 2001, died in 2011 but were he alive he might have some advice for Eugene Murtagh, the Cavan-born octogenarian who chairs building materials group Kingspan: if you are going to float off part of your business to cash in on the artificial intelligence (AI) revol
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