Richard Steer: Where in the world are consultants going?

Working in the consultancy sector of the construction industry over the past 18 months has been akin to being a passenger on the Titanic. After it hits the iceberg you somehow manoeuvre yourself into a lifeboat thinking that with a bit of luck and good navigation you will be blown to safety, but suddenly find yourself in danger of being swallowed up by the corporate equivalent of Moby Dick.

There is much speculation that the only way UK consultants can reach safe harbour is by sacrificing independence and joining forces with US engineering conglomerates such as Aecom, Jacobs or CH2MHill. You may recall that back in June last year I wrote that 2010 would be a watershed year, and that some marriages between consultancies and engineers were inevitable. However, I did not expect this to happen to any of the top five consultants. Then again, all of us have been surprised by the depth and severity of this recession.

It is easy to see why the Americans see the UK as the construction equivalent of Primark at the moment. The latest figures from the Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply say the industry’s rate of contraction increased slightly last month – a score of more than 50 indicates growth, and the level fell from a 23-month high of 48.6 in January, to 48.5. Civil engineering declined fastest, and the number of new orders fell for a third successive month. A combination of poor weather conditions, difficulty in finding funding and a scarcity of projects were to blame. The only fragment of reassurance was in the residential sector, which improved for the sixth month in a row; housebuilders felt the benefit of this in their share prices.

For those working in the commercial, mixed use, public and infrastructure sectors, things are only slightly better than the back end of 2009, and still have a long way to go to reach anything that feels normal. It is ironic that those who boosted their own turnover through a desire to expand, and to reduce the risk of becoming a takeover target, gained unsustainable overheads as a consequence. This now means they are now vulnerable to the competitor businesses that they wished to avoid. This is as true for some of the big QS practices as it has proved to be for the banks.

The QSs have many benefits for a potential purchaser. Most are multidisciplinary, they are closer to the client than many in the construction supply chain and have better margins than many of their counterparts, like the engineers, who have a much lower P/E rating (that is, the ration of shareprice to earnings, which investors use to calculate the “value” of a company). What is causing the pain for some of these UK consultancies is their exposure to markets that have suddenly disappeared overnight. This is compounded by fixed costs for premises that are twice as big as they need. They got big, but not big enough it would seem.

As for the Americans they have never been accused of doing things in half measures. The dollar/pound ratio enables deals to be financed, and the UK consultancy partner structure, which makes it so difficult to find consensus on the financing of global expansion, works in favour of accepting a life-saving takeover offer – especially if partners feel personally exposed. When you could lose your house, being adopted by an engineer from the US doesn’t seem so horrific.

But I am not so sure that this one-stop-shop big-is-beautiful philosophy has traction with all clients in the long term. Design, for instance, is still a unique, creative, and bespoke skill. Can one really see Zaha Hadid or Daniel Libeskind churning out designs for a big conglomerate? So, too, the role of the independent professional consultant has a place as an individual entity in the supply chain. The huge corporations that offer so-called ringfenced subsidiaries that design, cost, manage and build are not always as appealing to a client that wants a bespoke service. The fine buildings in the world’s great capitals, for instance, were not built in that way.

Ultimately what is true is that the global recession has changed some things for ever. Never has it been so apparent that we all work in a marketplace that is dominated by forces outside of UK control. It could well be that while the board of the engineering behemoths are looking at European acquisitions, so the board of the China State Construction Engineering Corporation, at present the worlds 16th largest contractor, with a reported turnover of nearly €12bn and 123,000 employees, is hungrily eyeing the US firms. In the first three quarters of this financial year, the Chinese construction giant signed more than $2bn worth of contracts in the US. Those of us in today’s worldwide construction market that survived the iceberg, and dodged the whale, may end up doing business in Mandarin within a generation.