Dive Brief:
- Balfour Beatty, the London-based infrastructure construction giant, is on track to see year-over-year growth across key measures of its business, according to the builder’s year-end trading update.
- The company expects its order book, or backlog, to grow by 20% in 2025, up from last year’s 18.4 billion pounds ($24.5 billion). Balfour Beatty said its growth was driven largely by its work in the U.K. construction market, particularly in the energy sector, which drove 3.5 billion pounds of new orders on the year.
- In addition, Balfour Beatty expects its revenue to come in 5% ahead of 2024’s 10 billion pounds, per the news release. It expects its profit from operations to be higher than 2024’s 252 million pounds, also due to U.K. work and partially offset by lower income in the U.S.
Dive Insight:
Balfour Beatty remains on track to achieve its full-year earnings expectations. The company’s cash generation via its profit and revenue were driven by the company’s work in select markets, such as U.S. buildings and U.K. energy, per the release.
In addition, the company committed to an additional share buyback in 2026, an initiative that Balfour Beatty leveraged this year as well, according to Philip Hoare, the company’s CEO.
“Our immediate priority is to finish 2025 strongly, while laying the groundwork for further progress in 2026, where I expect the Group to continue on its journey of delivering PFO growth from its earnings-based businesses,” Hoare said in the news release.
Despite the good news, the company noted weaker performance in its U.S. construction business weighed down its profit. In 2024, that segment of the business saw its revenue shrink 2% to 3.6 billion pounds.
Further weakness in that arm of the business continued this year as the segment recorded an 11 million pound loss in the first half of 2025, according to Balfour Beatty’s half-year earnings call in August.
Then-CEO Leo Quinn, who stepped down in September, told investors at the time that cost overruns at a highway project, which stemmed from design issues that led to rework, dragged on its U.S. Civils business.
Overall, Balfour Beatty’s full-year outlook for its U.S. Civils business, and U.S. Construction broadly, remains largely unchanged from the first half of the year, per the release. Despite the weakness, Balfour Beatty’s U.S. order book is expected to grow by over 10% in dollar terms in 2025, up from 2024’s $8.9 billion. That included $750 million of correctional facility work in the Southeast and $400 million for data centers in Virginia and Oregon.
