New OPPORTUNITIES

Aldesa is looking to the future toward renewables and even sustainable construction in line with global trends.

Grupo Aldesa, with 52 years, has consolidated itself as one of the leading construction companies. How has the company developed over this time?

We are essentially a construction group that has invested in quality and hired local people in order to develop local employment. We also try to invest in economically disadvantaged regions. The company was founded in 1969 and changed hands in 1991. We went from being a small company to developing all areas of civil works. Roads were part of the company’s beginnings, and gradually we began expanding into other areas of activity. We entered the private sector and began working in residential and non-residential construction. In early 2000, we started looking for other companies that could contribute to the development of the company. One of them was Coalvi, from Zaragoza, and acquiring the company allowed us to grow further in the rail industry, both in terms of tracks and stations. Around 2006, we were presented with the opportunity to break into Mexico through the hotel industry and we decided to acquire a plot of land in Huatulco. In addition, we also began operations in Krakow, Poland, by selling an office building that we had previously built.

China Railway Construction Corporation (CRCC), the second-largest construction company in the world, entered as a majority 75% stakeholder in May 2020. How have your daily operations changed since then?

CRCC is a macro company with a turnover of USD20 billion. It was interested in us because it found us to be a transparent company that was present in Europe and Latin America. The management of the group has not changed, and we continue to manage it. At the company strategy level, CRCC brings a huge financial capacity, so our strategy has changed. Without bank guarantees, our company was not able to operate, and thanks to CRCC, we can access larger projects with fewer competition and higher margins. CRCC has a large purchasing capacity. Our situation and strategy have changed radically. All this makes us more efficient and forces us to plan more and organize our time well.

How would you describe your current portfolio?

The investment part of the company is extremely relevant because they were projects that required a higher amount of capital. We were able to access some of these types of projects, but we now have the financial capacity to cover even more of them. Aldesa is extremely interested in renewables. We also develop our own parks. We currently have an agreement with a company to develop for it a park and do the EPC ourselves. For example, in Portugal the auctions were at knock-down prices. In Latin America, we are building many parks in Chile and Colombia, as well as other places. This is an issue of great concern to governments. It seems as though construction is a polluting business, but this is not always the case. You can do sustainable business by using materials that are better than others at the same price from an ecological point of view. We have ventures in real estate as well as in industrial sector.

What impact has the pandemic had on Grupo Aldesa?

We have advanced heavily in terms of digitalization in the corporate part of the company. Thanks to this, we were fairly well prepared for the pandemic. The great advantage is that one can telework and improve the quality of their lives. There are sectors that can move to 100% teleworking, but in our case, it would be a combined one because we have people working on building. In civil engineering works, which is what we do mostly in Spain, you have to be physically present. In terms of real estate, there is talk of digitalization and making modules in factories. This will be a breakthrough.