A 40-year foundation

Construction and development group Budimex celebrated its 40th anniversary last week. The company came into being in 1968 as Foreign Trade Center Budimex Construction, a state-owned enterprise offering construction services abroad, primarily in Asia, Africa and in other Soviet Bloc countries.

Budimex was privatized in 1992 and entered the Warsaw Stock Exchange three years later, one of the first companies from the sector to do so. As of January 2008, the firm's main shareholders were Valivala Holdings, a part of the Spanish Ferrovial Group (59.06 percent), and BZ WBK Asset Management (14.32 percent).

Budimex Group's H1 revenues, which amounted to zł.1.489 billion, came predominantly from construction; its profit, which stood at zł.45.986 million in the same period, was split more or less equally between the group's two main activities, construction and development. This is now likely to change, however, due to the boom in the construction sector and the slowdown in the residential market.

"The second half of the year will not be worse, but it will be different," said Marek Michałowski, president of the board and general director of Budimex. He added that the group's construction activities were expected to account for a larger part of total profit, perhaps amounting to as much as 70 percent of the total by year's end.