Market report: Galliford Try makes gains as it builds up work

Construction group Galliford Try has won a number of contracts recently

Joanna Hodgson16 September 2020

Part of Britain may look like ghost towns but there’s still plenty of cranes and scaffolding dotting the skyline.

Construction giant Galliford Try, which has recently won contracts to build homes in Tottenham, is among the builders very much back to work with all of its sites fully operational.

The company’s shares improved, despite Covid-19 disruption and delays hitting its performance.

Annual losses widened and revenues dropped to £1.1 billion from £1.4 billion, but it pointed to positive signs ahead. This year it expects to return to profitability and is looking to notch up sales of between £1.2 billion and £1.3 billion.

Chief executive Bill Hocking said the company is “performing well”. He added: “In recent months we have secured a number of significant project wins and we are well placed to benefit from planned future investment in our areas of operation.”

Shares in Galliford rose to close to 100p per share, before settling back, up 2.89p or more than 3%, to 90.83p.

Elsewhere today in the construction sector, Brickability was another riser. It said revenues in the year to March 31 climbed 14.6% to £187.1 million and pre-tax profits jumped 41.7% to £12.2 million. Shares in the AIM-listed building products supplier gained more than 5%, or 2.5p, to 46p.

But the housebuilding sector was less in favour today. FTSE 250 firm Redrow showed how the pandemic had hammered its full-year profits and the group sounded some caution. That appeared to have read across to the FTSE 100 index, with shares in Berkeley and Taylor Wimpey off 1% and 2% respectively.

Overall the blue-chip index was up 13.47 points to 6119.01. The FTSE 250 was 35.17 points lower at 17780.21.

Digital advertising firm Ocean Outdoor posted a 41% fall in first-half revenues to £36.2 million but said business is improving at the company which operates the digital advertising screens at the Westfield shopping centres in London. The shares were largely flat at $6.24.