News comes as Steve Canadine takes over as managing director of engineer’s UK arm
Engineer Ramboll has made 50 people redundant as government spending cuts lead to a drop in workload.
The news came as Steve Canadine took over as managing director for the UK arm of the firm from Charles McBeath.
Canadine said most of the redundancies had fallen in the firm’s health and education departments and had been caused by cut backs in government spending.
“It’s just workload we have all seen the forecasts for construction output and we are not immune from that,” he said.
He did not rule out further redundancies. “I’ve now been in my role two days so I’m looking at the business from top to toe. I would not rule out further redundancies but I don’t have any planned.”
Canadine added that he expected the UK arm of the business to suffer a fall in revenue and profit this year.
He said that although the firm had a substantial presence in Scandinavia and the Middle East, where it was performing well, that success was not providing enough work back in the UK to compensate for a drop off in domestic public sector work. Nor was growth in the private sector making up the shortfall, he added.
Canadine joined the executive board of Ramboll following the firm’s acquisition of engineer Gifford. He joined Gifford in 1996 as a structural engineer and worked his way up to become chief executive of the company in 2010.
He said: “I’m confident that we can continue to build upon our position as a leading engineering and design consultancy.”
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