Group Five banks on power
POWER contacts provide the most significant future opportunity to listed construction and engineering group Group Five in the next three to five years, followed by transport and real estate.
Group Five’s multi-year target opportunity pipeline was valued at R164 billion in June this year, with power accounting for R61bn of this total, followed by transport at R37bn and building at R27bn.
Eric Vemer, the chief executive of Group Five, said yesterday that power remained the most significant sector in the group’s opportunity pipeline and it was very active in west Africa, east Africa and South Africa.
Vemer said a lot of this work was in peaking plants in the thermal, renewable and gasfired environment, but there had been delays in the renewable energy programme.
“We are the preferred EPC (engineering, procurement, construction) contractor to a number of bidders in this programme, but the key issue is for those power purchase agreements to be signed between the bidding companies and Eskom and for the Department of Energy to authorise those to proceed to financial close.
“There is a good prospect of work there. We also see a lot of prospects in west Africa and east Africa in the oil and gas environment and have seen some improvement in the level of inquiries with the more recent recovery in the oil price,” he said.
Vemer said the transport sector was also significant, which covered the group’s roads and contracting activity and its Intertoll toll road business.
He said Group Five had extended its portfolio and was no longer only active in eastern Europe, but also in western Europe and Ireland, were looking at a project in Norway and had opened its office in Washington in the US.
Vemer said the group was bidding for a toll concession operation contract in Norway and bidding at the moment in all the Balkan countries, the Czech Republic and Russia and on further follow-up work in Northern Ireland.