With a turnover of £42.8m last year and high-profile projects, the company continues to go from strength to strength

Currie & Brown, the QS on the £400m redevelopment of the BBC’s London headquarters, is celebrating a rise in its profits for last year.

The company’s pre-tax profit for 2004 was £581,000 – up roughly a quarter of a million on the previous year’s £336,000.

A total of 99 new staff – mainly fee earners – were brought in last year, taking the head count from 556 at the end of 2003 to 655 by the end of last year. Group turnover also increased in 2004 to £42.8m, compared to £42.2m in 2003.

Despite these signs of fiscal health, Currie & Brown closed its Spanish operation last year, a move costing £115,000.

Currie & Brown put its rise in profits down to “particularly strong performance in Australia and the reduction of losses in the Far East and Europe” in its annual report. It blamed its failure to do any better on falling fees in the US, a situation it was addressing with measures that would begin to impact in 2005.

The UK arm saw a £1.5m rise in turnover to £28.8m, up from £27.3m for 2003. The operation was restructured in 2004 for regional focus and the Falkirk and Edinburgh offices were merged.

Currie & Brown switched from partnership to limited company status in March 2001. Chief executive David Broomer, who was unavailable to comment on the latest results as QS News went to press, said at the time that the change had been “complex but worthwhile”. For its first year as a limited company, the twelve months to 31 March 2002, the company posted a pre-tax profit of £1.4m and turnover of £38m. Broomer said of these results: “We are reasonably happy with the profits. But it’s tough – whether we will make quite as much this year, I’m not so sure.”

One of the firm’s highest profile projects outside the UK was a role on the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site in 2002.

Source

QS News