Alfred McAlpine unveils £17m pre-tax profit

Alfred McAlpine has announced an interim pre-tax profit of £17m. It has also revealed that during the first half of the year it secured £1bn-worth of new business.

Ian Grice, chief executive, said: "Trading conditions in our markets remain good and the value of new business has increased our orderbook to a record £3.7bn." He added: "We are encouraged by the continuing recovery in our Infrastructure Services business."

McAlpine’s interim results (six months to 30 June 2006) show turnover higher at £540m (£470m). Pre-tax profit in the same period last year ran to £16m, although this figure was inflated by a one-off profit of £3m resulting from the disposal of a joint venture.

McAlpine has four main business streams: business services; infrastructure services; project services; and slate.

The best performance came from business services, where a workload of £200m generated an underlying profit of £10.4m. New business secured was worth £800m, including McAlpine’s largest-ever contract award, which was signed in May, to
provide Mapeley with a total facilities management service for its UK property estate.

Infrastructure services is emerging from a muddle, returning the smallest underlying profit of the three main divisions, with a figure of £3.7m. The bulk of this (£2m) came from McAlpine’s joint venture for Scottish Water. The work McAlpine undertook on its own (worth £156m) produced a profit of £1.7m.

Grice said he is encouraged by the progress made in the division. Alan Robertson was brought in 12 months ago to head up a new management team, including a new finance director. "We’ve got out of underperforming contracts and have tightened everything up" said Grice. "The essentials have been in place since last autumn."

The highways maintenance element of McAlpine’s infrastructure division manages and maintains more than 9,654km of roads across five regions.