Profits soared at Web Summit after its first year in Lisbon
The company is bringing its spin-off Moneyconf event to Dublin in June.
PROFITS CLIMBED ABOVE €2 million at the company behind Web Summit after the Dublin-based tech events outfit moved its flagship conference to Lisbon.
New accounts for Manders Terrace, the Web Summit’s parent company, show it recorded net income of €2.05 million in 2016 – the first year its main conference was held in the Portuguese capital rather than Ireland.
The figure was a significant increase on the near-€128,000 profit the business recorded in 2015. While the company didn’t disclose income in its annual filings, the documents show the firm’s gross profits jumped from €6.9 million to €11.5 million in 2016.
Web Summit has since announced it plans to return to Dublin with its smaller Moneyconf event, which is expected to feature 5,000 attendees overs three days in June.
The company’s CEO, Paddy Cosgrave, has said the event could eventually swell to 20,000 people, but it was never likely to reach the scale of Web Summit’s around 60,000 attendees of last year.
In addition to its main event, the company also runs the Collision conference in New Orleans and Rise in Hong Kong.
The firm’s directors’ report highlighted the main risk to the company as “external market forces such as a slowdown in the information technology sector”.
Web Summit's Dublin HQ
Hiring
Last year Web Summit announced plans to hire another 40 staff, including one employee to be tasked with liaising with the Irish government.
The two parties, which had a public falling out at the time of the announcement that the Web Summit event was being moved from Dublin to Lisbon, appear to have since patched up their differences.
The company’s 2016 accounts show it had an average of 132 people on its books during the year, up from 106 for the previous 12 months. The firm’s total wage bill was just over €6 million, or an average of €45,742 per person.
Its three directors, Cosgrave, Daire Hickey and David Kelly, shared in remuneration of €350,000, down slightly on the €371,749 they were paid in 2015.
The company’s net assets increased to €3.7 million in 2016 from €1.66 million the previous year.
Cosgrave holds more than 80% of the shares in the business, with the remainder split between Hickey and Kelly. They did not receive a dividend from the company during the year.
