Global contractor moves UK headquarters to Birmingham

French contractor Colas has this week opened its new UK headquarters in Birmingham.

Colas specialises in transport infrastructure projects and its work includes the £38m Stoneleigh junction upgrade over the A46 and the A34 Sprint project in Walsall.

Its team will now be much closer to those projects after it moved in to Birmingham Business Park.

Colas is part of Bouygues, the group which employs 130,000 across the world. Colas’s chairman Frédéric Gardès and Bouygues chief executive Olivier Roussat came to Birmingham to open the office.

Carl Fergusson, the UK chief executive of Colas, said: “The new location puts us in the heart of the UK, closer to more of our regional business activities and clients, and offers us the facilities and connectivity we need to support our ambitious future growth plans which we were pleased to share with our visitors.”

Colas decided to relocate the corporate headquarters from Sussex to Birmingham earlier this year as part of its long-term strategic growth plans and post-pandemic property review.

It believes it will benefit from having its head office in a more central location within the UK, and at the same time has taken the opportunity to move to a building that provides a lower carbon footprint and enhanced collaborative working facilities that better reflects the post-pandemic working environment.