Ground force

While money trickles back in to the construction industry after a tough couple of years, piling and foundation companies are still treading water.

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Without solid foundations, the construction industry sits on pretty shaky ground and a lack of funding for new projects means contractors charged with providing piling and foundation work themselves are on fairly unstable territory.

Since the construction industry slowdown during the latter half of 2008, piling and foundation work has all but ground to a halt in the UAE.

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Work is still available, but the frantic level of activity prior to the slowdown has had an impact on the business, and caused many of the industry’s main players to tighten their belts in order to weather the current economic storm.

At the height of the construction boom in Dubai, more than 70 piling and foundations companies were operating in the emirate – but a drought in work has seen this number decline.

“Things are very quiet,” Mervin Fernandes, marketing manager for equipment specialists Hytec International, specialists in hydraulic construction equipment.

He says sales of construction machinery has remained constant, but the demand for piling rigs has dropped. “Nothing is moving and nothing has really changed since October 2008 when the industry went quiet.”

Hytec supplies both new and used piling rigs to contractors, but Fernandes said: “Both new and used markets are slow – there’s no movement of machinery and many contractors have stopped. Things have to change, but at this moment, we don’t know when that will happen.”

While funding is slowly trickling back into the construction industry, developers are reluctant to start new projects. Most money is being used to complete existing projects, not start new ones and, until that happens, piling and foundation contractors will continue to find it tough.

“The volume of work for the first two quarters of 2010 has certainly dropped,” said Shad Asif Khan, general manager of UAE specialists Keller Grundbau Gmbh.

“It seems it may pick up slightly in the third and fourth quarters – but still not enough in terms of the volume of
contractors out there looking for work.”