NCE Consultants File 2014

[sreevesjc]

Avid readers of New Civil Engineer and in particular the annual Consultants File 2014 published on 27 March will be astonished at the conspicuity of CH2M Hill by its absence. We do not feature anywhere in the 86 pages of free text and listings. Eventually you will find a whole page advertisement for our tunnelling skills on page 93, even though we are not in the top 20 listed seven pages earlier. A missed opportunity?
The reason given is the same as last year; i.e. waiting for the accounts to be finalised. You can reach whatever conclusion you want to from this stance. Last year’s loss was £71m, there is no point in hiding results that anyone can access.

[John Ratsey]

I had also noticed the absence in the tables (but failed to notice the advert).

I doubt if any of the other consultants will have got their accounts ready for 2013 but all (including CH2M / Halcrow) should have an adequately accurate idea of the income in 2013 by sector and region and they should also know how many staff they have on the payroll.

I wonder if the absence reflects a lack of interest in the UK market or maybe they just don't want the continuing bad news to be reflected on the various tables.

What I did notice in the Consultants File  is that Mott-Mac is now up to 16,000 staff. I recall that not so long ago they were of similar size to Halcrow. Their growth strategy seems to have been more successful.

[Donald Holliday]

I also noticed that neither Halcrow nor CH2MHill are listed and this caused me worry about the future of both companies.
Even before the takeover, Halcrow were often missing and I wondered why.

[John Ratsey]

Entry into the listing requires someone to fill in the forms and give information on workload, staffing, etc. CH2M Hill might consider that they are too big to bother with such trivial activities while, in respect of Halcrow, there's no motivation to provide data that will show a major sliding down the tables.