Getting back to growth: Arcadis’ new boss on honing in, getting agile and over-investing on HS2

By Daniel Gayne2026-03-23T07:00:00

After years of impressive growth, the global engineering practice saw its revenue drop in 2025 and its UK business was hit hard by the cuts to the high-speed rail vision. Daniel Gayne sat down with Heather Polinsky, the firm’s new CEO nominee, to find out how she plans to get ...

Heather Polinsky is not afraid to be clear about the problem she’s tasked with solving. “As you have probably seen, Arcadis’ growth has stalled a little bit,” she tells me as we meet on the eve of her ascension to the position of CEO nominee.

Until its full-year results for 2025 were published last month, the company’s revenue had grown every year since 2019. The period of expansion, helped along by a series of acquisitions in multiple sectors, was only the latest chapter in a story that saw a rural Dutch land reclamation company slowly transform into a global engineering giant.

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