First The House Builders, Now The Construction Sector
In a move which underlines how deep the UK slowdown is starting to bite it has been announced that Stewart Milne Group, one of Scotland's largest construction companies has pushed through 289 redundancies as activity levels continue to fall. More recently we had the doom and gloom scenario from the house building sector and it looks like the construction sector is next on the list.
There are now regular reports of smaller construction companies struggling to find work and more and more employees losing their jobs. While these smaller job losses rarely hit the headlines they are now so common that there is a real concern that the industry is in melt down. Slow but surely we are seeing more and more projects delayed or cancelled often projects which had been in the pipeline for a number of years. In this type of environment it is near impossible for those in the construction industry to plan ahead with any real belief in their figures.
There is a feeling that while the news at the moment is very bad it can only get worse in the short term and it is interesting to see that there has been no takeover interest in ANY of the construction companies as yet, even though many share prices have collapsed of late.
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