Landscape projects firm hails ‘golden’ Olympics

The Huddersfield-based group believes it will achieve orders worth £9.5m to £10m to supply the Games’ various sites – the upper end of its target.

Marshalls is now in the peak phase of its work on the £10bn project, and is currently supplying hundreds of tonnes of paving and landscaping products daily.

“We’ve quoted £16m of product and converted it into £8.5m of orders. We’re going to be doing £9.5m and it would be good to end up with something approaching £10m,” said commercial sales director Jaz Vilkhu.

Marshalls hopes working on the Olympics will showcase its capabilities to potential customers. The group last week showed investors and analysts around the site in Stratford, east London.

“We’re renowned for these prestigious projects,” said finance director Ian Burrell. “We have the benefit of being the one company in the paving industry that can actually deliver to these prestigious projects. The architects and contractors know to come to us.

“There will be virtually else who can do the quantum of these projects. We’ve put the investment in over many years.”

Work on the Olympics is helping insulate Marshalls from a deep slump for construction firms and building products companies. Weak consumer confidence and companies’ reluctance to spend on new-build and maintenance projects is depressing demand for building products. Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics showed construction output volumes slumped 4.1 per cent in August versus a year earlier. Figures showed output volumes edged up 0.4 per cent in August from July.

Volumes in the three months to the end of August were 1.9 per cent lower than in the same period a year ago, with new work falling by 1.8 per cent and repair and maintenance down 2.2 per cent.

The construction sector makes up 7.6 per cent of gross domestic product.

“The picture is uncertain given what’s happening in the macro environment but there’s still reasonable visibility of the projects for next year,” said Marshalls chief executive Graham Holden.

The company is also hopeful of winning work on the Games’ legacy phase, which will involve converting the northern and southern areas of the site to drive the regeneration of east London. The two 24-month contracts are worth more than £100m.

“This is Europe’s largest construction site,” said Mr Vilkhu. “The 2012 legacy is going to bring the next five years of... product opportunities for us. That will really be about the regeneration of east London.”

Marshalls has split its Olympics workload into 47 sub-projects. Most are in London on the main Olympic park, but some are at sites such as Coventry’s Ricoh Arena and Weymouth, the venue for sailing competitions.

Currently about 40 Marshalls lorries arrive daily at the various Olympics sites, as many of the projects enter their landscaping phase. This peak period is expected to run until February.

“This is a huge project and to make sense of it we’ve had to split it into sub-projects,” said Mr Vilkhu. “Every part of Marshalls has truly been involved in terms of planning it, designing it and hauling it to London for the site.”

Marshalls is currently supplying the Athletes’ Village with paving and landscaping products including benches and signs. The Village, which will be home to about 17,000 athletes and officials during the Games, includes shops, restaurants, medical, media and leisure facilities and expanses of open space.

It comprises 14 individual plots, each designed by a different architect, and after the Games will be transformed into 2,800 new homes, including 1,379 affordable homes. Marshalls is supplying about 95 per cent of the site’s landscaping products, worth around £2.1m.

Marshalls is supplying the Games with concrete and natural stone products from sites including Bedfordshire and Halifax.

It is also currently ferrying about five million paving blocks to the Northern Spectator Transport Mall to form a vast coach park. The contract, worth more than £1m, involves paving more than 20 acres of football pitches.

Contractors are using the group’s machine laying system to cover about 100,000 square metres with permeable paving, which will be removed after the Games.

Games boost for over 120 companies

The 2012 Olympic Games has boosted a range of Yorkshire firms, including structural steel group Severfield-Rowen.

The Thirsk-based group has supplied thousands of tonnes of steel to the east London site.

Its biggest project was supplying the main Olympic Stadium. Severfield’s subsidiary Watson Steel Structures provided 10,600 tonnes to form the spine of the 80,000-seat stadium. Severfield also supplied the steel for the Basketball Arena. The 1,000-tonne project took eight weeks and was completed in 2010.

The group also supplied steel to the Arcelor Mittal Orbit, the 115m tall sculpture which is the largest piece of public art in the UK. Severfield supplied 1,670 tonnes of steel to the project, which features two viewing platforms.

Yorkshire Forward says more than 120 Yorkshire businesses have won contracts relating to the Games.