The Upper Austrian family construction company has grown enormously over the past ten years with acquisitions and large orders from pipelines to highways. A German competitor with 500 employees has just been taken over and further investments are being sought.
“Ten percent less turnover wouldn’t hurt to take a breather”, Hubert Wetschnig, CEO of the Habau Group, smiles. In fact, he recently did the opposite again: the acquisition of the German special construction company Schick generated a turnover of 150 million euros in addition to 500 employees.
Result: “In the current financial year until March next year, I expect a group turnover of 1.85 billion euros, so with Schick we are scratching the two billion mark.” This means that the Upper Austrian family business will have doubled in size within ten years. Secretly, Habau has grown to become the fourth largest domestic construction company. “We are not as well known as Strabag or Porr, but our customers know us, so an IPO is not an option.” The company is in good financial shape (“we want to be able to earn 3.5 percent”).
According to Wetschnig, further growth is announced. “We need a certain size to participate in certain orders. Local presence is also important because employees are less and less willing to travel to construction sites.”
There are still blank spots in Austria and Germany, “We would like to do Switzerland too,” says the operational boss, charting the course that the two founding families Halatschek (60 percent) and Rumpler-Heindl (40 percent) support in supervision plate.
In addition to short decision-making processes, Habau also scores with a broad basis: subsidiaries such as Held&Francke, Ostu-Stettin or MCE recently built a natural gas pipeline from the Baltic Sea to the Czech Republic or the expansion of the Verbund power plant Reisseck II With a project size of 1.4 billion euros, the largest order in the company’s history for the Havelland Autobahn near Berlin.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
