Sammon on course for revenue to hit €100m

SAMMON CONTRACTING is on course to more than double revenues to €100 million-plus this year, bucking the slump in construction that has seen two big players go to the wall in recent months.

Sammon specialises in school building and social infrastructure, and has developed a strong presence in the Middle East, where it is working on a series of projects in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The group has just filed accounts with the Companies’ Registration Office showing that revenues last year grew by more than 200 per cent to €44.4 million from €13.5 million in 2009.

It had losses of €650,000, which it attributed to the cost of boosting capacity in the Middle East ahead of taking on school-building contracts worth €100 million in the UAE.

Sammon chief executive Miceál Sammon said the company’s revenues were likely to exceed €100 million this year.

This includes a doubling of turnover in the Republic, where it has completed seven schools for the Department of Education, a contract that was worth €20 million.

The company has built five schools in Abu Dhabi in the UAE. This month, it handed over the keys to more than 340 newly built classrooms to education authorities in Ireland and the UAE.

Sammon is about to begin work on projects in Saudi Arabia, whose government is committed to school and social infrastructure building programmes worth €59 billion.

It is also hopeful of winning further contracts in Abu Dhabi, which is planning a new phase of school building.

“These projects, near completion in Abu Dhabi, coupled with new school-building projects about to commence in Saudi Arabia, further strengthen the Sammon Group’s position as one of the region’s largest contractors,” Mr Sammon said yesterday.

The company employed 4,500 people over the last 12 months, 300 of them in the Republic and the remainder in the Middle East, where construction is more labour-intensive than it is here.

Sammon funds its activities from its own cash flow and has no bank debt outside a €32,000 overdraft. At the end of last year, it had €6.6 million in the bank and €3.2 million in net assets. Cash increased by €6.7 million in 2010.

In the past year, the group has taken further steps to limit costs and cut overheads.

Mr Sammon and his wife and fellow director, Cathy Sammon, founded the group in 1986. It has businesses in Ireland, Britain and the Middle East.

Over the past decade, the company began to specialise in school building in the Republic, where demand for infrastructure had increased. It began exporting these skills as the local construction industry headed into its current slump in 2007.