Flexibility Is Our Strength
Last year saw the continuation of a development that actually began in 2013. There has been a reduction in industrial and power industry projects, but more traditional building projects have increased.
It is a great source of strengths for a company like ours to have the flexibility to change focus points like this. The process has not been painless, but we have managed to adapt successfully to changed marked conditions.
The competition in the building market is different from the more specialised industrial and power industry projects. It is therefore important to carve a niche and offer costumers services that they do not get elsewhere.
One of the ways in which we have done this is to take the knowledge we have gathered in industrial projects and apply it to the building sector for the benefit of the parties in question, e.g. by offering our customers EPCM services for projects. This entails that we oversee all engineering, procurement, management and construction management for the project.
This is the case in the East Harbour area (Austurhöfn), where we manage the engineering and construction of a hotel and residential centre. This arrangement is not frequent in the Icelandic construction industry so this is, in a certain sense, pioneering work on our behalf.
We have also increased our emphasis on sustainability in design. People are becoming more aware of and interested in environmental issues and there is much we can do in design and construction to reduce any negative environmental impact of construction and operations.
This can certainly increase the initial cost of the building, but in the vast majority of instances, overall efficiency will increase over the lifetime of the building. To name a simple example, more costs to insulate a building will result in lower heating costs. The increased initial cost will then decrease with lower heating costs.
But sustainability is about more than reducing the carbon footprint of construction and the operation of buildings. Sustainability is also about designing buildings where people enjoy being. Part of this approach to engineering design is thus to put more emphasis on the building’s indoor environmental quality, lighting, ventilation, heating control and so forth.
We are convinced that by emphasising sustainability in our design, we are not only providing our customers with more valuable services, but also making the buildings more comfortable for users. The fact that we are helping customers to play their part in protecting the environment is also important.
We have rather large offices in Hungary and Germany, operating mainly in the field of geothermal energy. These may be considered our entryways to foreign markets. These offices work closely together and our aim is to further increase this collaboration.
We have a large group of experts in geothermal operations working for us, and we are currently working on projects in Central Europe in this field. These projects have come to us through our German and Hungarian offices. These are projects that we could not take on, were it not for these overseas offices.