Carillion tops leader board with 2012 media centre win

Carillion’s £350m contract to build the Olympic media centre propelled it to the top of the leader board in August.

The deal was one of 36 wins notched up by the support services juggernaut last month and accounted for almost half of its £711m haul.

It will build the 1.3 million ft2 scheme, together with developer Igloo, although the final cost, design and legacy are still the subject of heated debate. “The price is probably a bit on the conservative side,” said one source close to Carillion this week.

Elsewhere, it picked up a string of education deals, which included a £28m academy for North Somerset council and a £26m school deal in York. It also won a £47m prison contract at Shotts in Scotland.

HBG, which is soon-to-be-rebranded BAM UK, finished in second spot with seven contracts worth less than a third of Carillion’s haul. Its wins included a £56m deal for Cheshire college and a £43m contract for Bournemouth and Poole college.

Laing O’Rourke finished in third place, thanks to a £200m mixed-use development in Bury, Lancashire, for Thornfield Properties and an £18m deal with HSBC for a data centre in West Yorkshire. Balfour Beatty and Rok completed the top five.

In a further sign of a cooling market, the number of jobs won in August was down from 331 last year to 312.

The total work won in monetary terms was up from £1.7bn last August to £2.3bn, largely thanks to Carillion’s media centre win and Laing O’Rourke’s £200m Bury job. Unsurprisingly, the biggest contribution came from the public sector with £1.2bn.

Including civils projects, Laing O’Rourke finished in second spot, thanks to a £400m win for the first phase of the London Gateway container port.

Given the restless ambition of chief executive Ray O’Rourke, he will be equally pleased to have leapfrogged Balfour Beatty at the top of the annual rolling leader board – and with 35 contracts compared with Balfour’s 828.

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