In its second year under private equity ownership, Octavius Infrastructure has seen its balance sheet strengthen despite squeezed margins.
Leading transport infrastructure provider Octavius has published its financial results for the year ending 31 March 2023, delivering strong financial results in a difficult macro environment.
The results represent a successful first full year as a wholly independent business, having built a separate support function, rebranded to Octavius and transitioned to becoming a standalone entity focussed on Highways and Rail infrastructure, construction and maintenance.
The strategy to focus on existing customer relationships and core capabilities resulted in a successful year for sales, increasing turnover by 13% to £215m (£191m in 2022). This performance has led to a strong year-end balance sheet and increases in net assets.
Over the year, the company invested heavily in its support functions, completed its largest ever single project (A46 Binley Junction), was awarded the A46 Walsgrave junction project and successfully won places on Network Rail’s CP7 frameworks in both the Southern and Wales & Western regions, as well as on the Pagabo framework.
For the second successive year, the business has delivered EBITDA above £6m. The Board considers the results to represent a solid performance with a strong pipeline underpinning future growth, with many more improvements planned in the coming year.
Commenting on the results John Dowsett, CEO Octavius said:
“These results represent a solid year in which we’ve continued to lay firm foundations for success as an independent, specialist engineering business that our customers, partners and colleagues want to work with. With a strong project pipeline and further opportunities to convert, the Board and I have every confidence in our strategy to safely deliver profitable growth across Highways and Rail.
As ever, it is our people that sets our business apart. They have thrived in our newly independent business, seizing the opportunity to make some great improvements such as investing in carbon neutrality, recruiting new talent, further developing our existing teams and delivering £63m of Social Value. These have been achieved whilst continuing to place safe project delivery for our customers at the heart of everything that we do and against a backdrop of significant cost inflation.”
During the year Octavius Infrastructure spent more than £60,000 on reforestation and renewable energy projects around the world – planting 4,000 trees – to ‘offset’ 4,000 tonnes of CO2e.
Octavius Infrastructure is one of four contractors on Network Rail’s Southern Integrated Delivery framework, which is expected to deliver £9bn of work over the next 10 years. It also has a stations and building works contract for Network Rail’s Wales & Western Region.
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