Actavo to seek business from National Broadband Plan, sees potential for US growth after 25pc profit rise

ENGINEERING and industrial services group Actavo — formerly known as Siteserv — will look to win business out of the National Broadband Plan.

Chief executive Sean Corkery told the Sunday Independent the company had “done very well” in providing construction and installation services to carriers here.

“The only one we’re not doing business with currently is Eir, everyone else, we’re the guys, whether it’s Siro, or Virgin or Sky, we’re exclusive in two of those cases,” he said.

Siro — a joint venture between Vodafone and the ESB — is in the running with Eir and David McCourt’s Enet to roll out the State-subsidised rural broadband scheme.

“In terms of the National Broadband Plan we’re certainly very interested, Corkery said.

“We’re not in with Enet, but we’re talking with the Siro guys, we’re in conversations with the Eir guys...but I suppose it all comes down to who’s going to get it.”

Actavo, majority-owned by Digicel chairman Denis O’Brien (the largest shareholder in the publisher of this newspaper), sees potential for rapid growth in the US. Last week it posted a 25pc rise in pre-tax profit in 2015 and said it “continues to trade strongly” this year.

In March, the company bought US-based Atlantic Engineering Services, enabling it to add design services to existing construction and installation capability for fibre networks. “We think it’s going to grow very fast. We probably need to add more capability... so we’ ll probably do another acquisition there sometime in the future,” Corkery said.

“The other thing about the US is that over time we could introduce some of the other services we have like industrial services, there’s a big oil and gas industry there obviously,” he added.

Actavo chief financial officer Alan Doherty said an IPO would be an option if the company came across a “very large, more transformative” acquisition target, but added that a float wasn’t “an end in itself ”.