Leading UK contractor reports strong growth.
Keltbray today announced a 25% increase in turnover for the financial year ending 31 October 2015, from £216.9 million to £272.3 million. Gross profit improved by £7.8 million to £45.4 million a 21% increase. Operating profit was £11.6 million, an increase of £3.6 million compared to 2014, and an improvement in margin to 4.3%.
Keltbray Group employs over a 1,000 people and has three reporting streams: Demolition & Civil Engineering (turnover £202 million), Rail (turnover £54 million) and Environmental Materials Management (turnover £16 million).
Keltbray’s Demolition & Civil Engineering (D&CE) business stream is the UK market leader in demolition and groundwork operations. This includes engineering design consultancy, piling and asbestos management. The piling business had exceptional growth to £35 million (2014 £20 million) and the asbestos business in now in the top five by size in the UK.
The D&CE business stream continues to develop its specialist skills with investment in new plant and recruitment of staff to provide a unique diversity of service in the UK demolition, groundworks and piling sectors. Opportunities are now increasingly opening up to combine this capability with the other business streams in the rail and remediation markets to further enhance Keltbrays integrated offering to a wider range of clients. For example on Queen Mary Viaduct in London for Network Rail Keltbray has undertaken demolition, piling, trackwork and overhead line electrification.
Keltbray’s Rail business stream includes electrification design and build, as well as rail civil engineering, piling and plant hire solutions. This business is working on the Great Western Mainline, Crossrail eastern access routes and in Wales on electrification and piling frameworks and is now expecting an acceleration in workloads as the market recovers following last year’s slow down due to various Government reviews. Keltbray is supporting this development with investment in plant, people and training resources.
With regards to Keltbray’s third business stream, Environmental Materials Management, which covers remediation of contaminated land and materials, demand levels in the residential sector remain strong and provide good opportunities for growth.
About Keltbray’s 2015 results, Group Chief Executive, Brendan Kerr said: “Keltbray was formed as an earthmoving and groundworks company in 1976, and it is pleasing to see how we have grown to become an award-winning specialist contractor with a £270 million annual turnover and more than 1,000 employees in our 40th year.
