Water and Effluent Treatment Magazine
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/507429
leaders 2105 13 And, of course, there are the alliances aspect. "We do try and tailor our alliance relationships to reflect the nature of the client requirement." United Utilities, for instance, comprises of relatively large schemes. "Our relationship with Laing O'Rourke has been developed very strongly around delivering large schemes. We believe they bring a huge amount in terms of off-site fabrication standardisation capability." Atkins continues: "That's an alliance we think is really well suited to the challenges that we're facing for United Utilities. And Atkins are a key part of our alliance as well, and who are strong in terms of their ability to deliver standard solutions and apply techniques like the BIM process to delivering solutions." He says: "We're looking at really pushing that to drive efficiencies. We believe we provide a strong element of innovation and challenge to support those kind of more construction-driven solutions. We bring innovation to the solutions themselves, the opportunity to optimise existing works where appropriate and to come with new technological solutions to particular challenges." THE NUMBERS 2011 2012 2013 % cHaNgE Sales £M 71.9 102.5 115.9 13 Gross profit £M 6.6 7.4 8.4 14 Operating profit £M 2.8 3 3.5 17 Pre-tax profit £M 2.9 3 3.5 17 Staff 167 232 218 -6 Net assets £M 5.7 6.5 7.8 20 THE RaTIOS 2011 2012 2013 % cHaNgE Return on capital % 50.5 46.3 45.1 -3 Gross margin % 9.2 7.2 7.2 1 Operating margin % 4 2.9 3 4 Net margin % 4 2.9 3 4 Sales/employee £K 430.5 441.9 531.7 20