FCC grows outside Spain

Services and construction group FCC has reported a profit of € 40,5 million in the first quarter of 2011, an improvement of +9,8% compared with the same period of 2010 - despite ongoing problems in the Spanish construction and cement businesses.

The Spanish-based company said these results reflected the positive performance of businesses such as environmental services, where EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) expanded +11,5%, broadly offsetting the impact of the decline in activity in construction and cement in Spain.

FCC's chairman and CEO, Baldomero Falcones, said that the first‐quarter figures reflected the group's commitment to diversifying geographically and by sector.

EBITDA amounted to € 291,7 million in the first quarter, which was a -4,2% decline compared with a year earlier, but the EBITDA margin improved by +0,1 percentage point to 11,9%.

Overall, construction was 21,5% of EBITDA, and cement 12,7%.

Revenues amounted to € 2,6 billion in the period, a decline of -4,9% over the same period last year. FCC said this performance reflected the combined effects of sustained growth in the environmental services division (+2,2%) and in the construction and cement divisions outside Spain (+8,9%), and the slowdown in activity in construction and cement in Spain.

Activity outside Spain continued to grow, accounting for 45,9% of group revenues - an increase of +8,5%.

Other European countries made up 83,7% of that, with the remaining 16,3% coming from America (4,9% in the US, and 6,0% from Latin America), and the Asian and African regions (5,4%).

A backlog of € 37,3 billion was +5,5% up on the 2010 year end, and the backlog outside Spain increased by +13%.