Operating review Group Keltbray’s strategy to focus on high value, stable market sectors, where our engineering expertise and integrated delivery capabilities create greater certainty for customers, has underpinned our resilient performance over the last 12 months. Our ‘Business as Usual’ approach, exemplified by our Infrastructure Rail and Energy businesses throughout the pandemic, coupled with prior years’ investments in our delivery platform, augmented by strategic acquisitions and operational discipline have positioned the Group well to benefit from increased economic and social infrastructure investment over the next five-year period. The Group’s purpose ‘To redefine the way sustainable development is delivered’ was supported during the year through advancements in how we are applying real-world innovations to meet today’s challenges. Our investments in
Earth Friendly Concrete took significant steps forward as we committed to its use in material volumes on our temporary works packages. We also made significant progress in the development of the HIPER Pile®. This is a ‘game changer’ for the industry as it has the potential to transform structural piling into a valuable capital asset that has applications in the industrial, energy and waste sectors, while reducing the amount of materials required to produce them, allowing customers to benefit from a significant reduction in embedded carbon. We continued to maintain our focus on driving greater performance and control into all our delivery activities during the year. Recognising the continuing pressure on margins in a predominantly lowest costdriven market environment, we took decisive action to retain cash
in the business, while ensuring customer focus remained at the heart of everything we do. We continued our smart diversification approach to provide greater protection from market cyclicality, introducing greater selectivity into our opportunity pipeline through the establishment of a capital allocation forum, The Executive Investment Panel, to ensure we seek to only pursue work that meets our strict financial criteria. During the year, we kept our costto-serve activities under intense scrutiny to ensure we were sizing our overhead in line with the good quality opportunities we have identified, thereby optimising the use of our resources, and allocating capital where it generated the greatest returns for the Group. This benefited the Group by £11.9m after exceptional costs, as we removed duplicate activities and refocused investment into business development and work-
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Keltbray Group (Holdings) Limited Annual Report & Consolidated Financial Statements | 2020
