Bardsley separates construction and development arms
BARDSLEY Construction has undergone a major restructuring which has seen the company split its property development and construction arms.
The move is detailed in newly-filed accounts for Bardsley Construction Ltd, which show that since its year end the business has separated out its development and construction arms into different companies and completed a refinancing with its bank, Royal Bank of Scotland.
Bardsley Construction has been sold to a newly-created parent company, Bardsley Construction Holdings, while the assets of its development subsidiaries were sold to Bardsley Construction Group.
The company said that this “has the benefit of degearing its balance sheet and taking it out of the residential housing sector”.
Writing in the notes to the accounts, chairman Roly Bardsley said the company had “successfully restructured and refinanced after two years of intense work”.
“It has been an expensive and distracting process, but one which sets us up perfectly for the climb out of recession and into better times”.
The refinancing has provided the company with a term loan as opposed to a facility which is repayable on demand, and Bardsley said the separation of the businesses meant it now had “a structure of two independent groups, trading for the benefit of each other, but strongly and financially independent”.
Accounts for the year to December 31, 2010 show that the Dukinfield-based group improved sales by 12.9% to £64.8m, compared with an annualised figure of £57.4m for the previous 12 months. It also converted a pre-tax loss of £1.9m in its prior year into a profit of £1.5m.
Writing in the notes to the accounts, chairman Roly Bardsley said: “Bardsley Construction has been in business for more than 45 years, during which time the company has faced many different challenges, none more so than the recent recession than the Government Comprehensive Spending Review.”
He said that the cuts in government spending meant that public sector projects are “heavily-fought over” when tenders are issued, but added that the outlook for its contracting business remained strong, with more than £45m of business already won in 2011, which represents 87% of its projected turnover target.
The firm said that it has also developed a new funding model known as Genesis which will target schemes that have stalled due to a lack of public sector cash.
Bardsley said that the potential pipeline of projects it is targeting through such funding “is already standing at £100m and will hopefully start to generate turnover towards the last quarter of 2011”.
Bardsley Construction Group finished the year with net cash in the bank of £5.8m, which is an increase of £2m on the previous year end. This is despite the firm injecting £1.6m of its own funds in progressing its Dukinfield Golf Club and Boatyard schemes, where it has started the second phase of development after selling all of the first phase within 8 months.
