Business gets ready for Olympian function-fest

By GILES PARKINSON

In four days, the Sydney Olympics will begin and the greatest networking and sponsorship event known to (business-) man will get under way.

Some $2.6 billion has been spent on the official sponsorship of the Games - and, it seems, nearly that much again in ambush marketing and "hospitality."

There is much dispute over the value of Olympic sponsorship. In the modern Olympics, it lacks exclusivity, attracts controversy and is an easy target for the ambush marketers.

Ask people for the name of the airline that is sponsoring the Sydney Olympics and not many will get it right. Ansett is the correct answer, but the carrier has had to take Qantas to court to remind the public of the fact.

But perhaps sponsorship is just a good excuse to invite several hundred of your favourite clients and give them a whopping good time. If the Games themselves seem glamorous, then check out the parties, the catering, the boats, the corporate boxes and the lavish entertainment occurring right across the city.

Every hotel in the city has been booked out - some by the Olympic Family and some, in their entirety, by a single corporate. Those corporates that missed out on hotel rooms have had to send out for cruise liners of their own

If there is any doubt about the serious intent of businesspeople to seriously enjoy themselves, then a cursory glance at the business calendar should resolve that. The nation that stops for a horse race is going to come to a grinding halt for the Olympics, because, it seems, there is hardly a single event in the business diary between September 15 and October 1. Except, of course, at various networking functions spread throughout the city. And each venue has lots of tellies.

The Olympic Games have been conveniently scheduled to begin the day after the end of the profit reporting season. This is thought to be more of a happy coincidence than a deliberate act, because it is hard to imagine Juan Antonio Samaranch scheduling anything around the listing rules of the Australian Stock Exchange. Even so, the local corporate regulators have relaxed the rules that govern the release of annual reports and the holding of annual general meetings.

In the past few months, there has been a rash of capital-raisings and floats.

Last Friday there were three - and they all did rather well. This week there will be a few stragglers who couldn't get away before the fund managers unpacked their party gear, and then there will be nothing until the Olympics are over in the first week of October.

Foster's, which recently completed the $2.6 billion acquisition of Beringer Wines in the Nappa Valley, managed to get away a $1.4 billion capital-raising, but the schedule was tight. Fund managers in the US were still on holiday, and their counterparts in Australia are not going to be around this week.

Vodafone, which had scheduled the country's biggest capital-raising earlier this year before pulling it after the tech rout, has been putting out feelers to see if there is any interest in a second attempt.

The international market for telcos has gone sour again, but the local fund managers are just not interested in anything like that right now.

Come back in October, they have suggested.

The one exception to the rule has been AlintaGas, which is raising several hundred million dollars as the West Australian Government sells its remaining 55 per cent stake.

The retail offer actually opens today, extends right through the Olympics and closes on the Friday after the torch is handed over to the organisers of the next Olympiad in Athens. The WA Government figures most retail investors in Perth are staying right where they are, in front of the telly about 4500km from the action - though they won't know the final price until the fund managers come back from Olympic duty and start bidding for their shares.

One curious sidebar to all of this is that the Olympic Park could become the most concentrated network of mobile phones the world has ever seen.

And they may all be used at once: that will be to explain they will be late home and deny suggestions that the Sydney Olympic transport is a bigger mess than Atlanta.

*Giles Parkinson is deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review.