Arabtec CEO Tom Barry forecast

[sharewadi]

Decent enough article about Arabtec (ARTC) and the boss, Tom Barry, on the UK website building.co.uk. Includes some forecasts for Arabtec's 2009 and 2010 revenue and profits. Apparently Mr Barry is "one of the people best placed to forecast what will happen next". Well, you'd hope so, given that he's running a construction firm. And he's saying things are on the up. But what did he say 18 months ago? Did he think a slowdown or crash was coming? Or did he think things were on the up? Some excerpts ...

building.co.uk 06 November 2009:

Tom Barry: 'The UAE is coming out of recession as we speak' By Roxane McMeeken Tom Barry is boss of Arabtec, the UAE’s biggest contractor, and he’s been doing the job for 35 years. So who better to ask what’s going to happen next to the Emirates? If you work in Dubai, you’ll be used to seeing the name Arabtec plastered all over the city’s building sites. If you don’t, you might have heard the name in connection with a certain labour camp, whose horrendous conditions were exposed in a BBC documentary in April. But for anyone unfamiliar with Arabtec, it is the UAE’s biggest contractor – its 52,000-strong workforce dwarfing names like Al-Futtaim Carillion, which has about half as many UAE staff. It went public in 2004, has no majority shareholder, and it has had a hand in most of the UAE’s best known projects, including the world’s tallest tower, the Burj Dubai, the Burj al Arab hotel in Dubai and Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace. The contractor may not always have had favourable press coverage, but ask industry insiders about it and the reaction is one of respect. One consultant says: “They’re no-nonsense; they come in and get the job done.” This solid reputation has been built up over the 35 years since the firm was founded in Dubai, which makes it an established player in a city where everything seems to be new. Tom Barry, Arabtec’s chief executive, has been with the company from day one and is similarly respected and straightforward. Now that the construction sector is showing signs of revival in the UAE, Barry is one of the people best placed to forecast what will happen next. ... But Barry says things will improve from now on. The results for 2009 should show at least £108m in net profit with a margin of about 8.5%. Barry says: “The fourth quarter will be slightly better than the third because of the Abu Dhabi projects coming on line.” In 2010, he expects to see a top line of about £1.2bn. Indeed, as Building reported last week, Arabtec is beginning to win new projects in the UAE, chief among them the Nation Towers, a £266m scheme in Abu Dhabi. It is also winning contracts that had been shelved, including a 1,000-villa scheme for Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Housing. But Barry adds that the volume and pace of construction in the UAE will never return to the levels seen during the boom. Certainly, clients are driving harder bargains, with contractors facing 15% lower margins and performance bonds of up to 40%. Clients also want to pay over longer periods. “We’re looking at 60 to 90 days,” says Barry. And they want to pay less or even nothing upfront. “It makes it difficult to take a project on because you can’t get loans to cover this,” he says. ...

Full story here:
http://www.building.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=659&storycode=3152435&c=1

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