Metrostav builds up foreign market
The Czech Republic’s biggest construction firm Metrostav has been expanding abroad to compensate for the lack of contracts at home, the daily Hospodářské noviny reported on Thursday. While 10 years ago, foreign commissions accounted to just about three percent of the Czech unit’s business, last year it was already 23 percent and in the first quarter of 2017, the proportion reached 26 percent.
At the moment, Metrostav is building a metro station in Finland’s Helsinki and won a tender for building a six-kilometre-long road tunnel in Iceland. It has also been working on several commissions in Sweden through its daughter company Subterra.
According to Václav Soukup, head of the company’s foreign business division, Metrostav also wants to strengthen its position on the German, Polish and Slovak markets to compensate to make up for its losses at home, writes Hospodářské noviny.
Last year, Metrostav posted a 12 percent loss in turnover and its net profit dropped by 44 percent to 329.4 billion crowns.
“Our possibility to expand abroad is limited by our options, especially by the limited number of employees, Václav Soukup told the daily.
Metrostav currently employs around 5,000 people, with around 1500 of them working abroad. The company has recently also entered new markets in Turkey or Belarus.
“We are currently in the process of signing a deal on building an underground funicular railway similar to the one on Prague’s Petřín, but it is hidden underground,” Soukup told the daily.
Metrostav has also pushed its way into the Belarusian market. It is building a water treatment plant in the town of Brest-Litovsk and is also seeking to win a contract for building an underground in Minsk.
