// Interview
A Clear Vision Linesight started life as Bruce Shaw in Ireland 40 years ago as a small cost and project management company - predominantly quantity surveying. Times were tough in 1980s Ireland but the government introduced tax incentives that eventually attracted large US corporations. Working with these multinationals was the start of a journey that would take Linesight beyond Irish shores. Over the past 12 years the company has expanded internationally and now has 17 offices around the world. Niall Greene, Managing Director Middle East, spoke to Jason O’Connell about the company’s journey and where it goes from here. What does Linesight offer its clients? Our primary service offering is cost consultancy and project management. Having been in relationships with some of the large multinationals, we had to expand our offering because they were looking for us to do more. So we had two choices. We could either curtail our service or expand it to compliment them and at the end of the day it’s all about meeting the client’s requirements. So we expanded our scope of services to programme management, development management, project controls and then the cost consultancy – all of those complimentary to each other. In the last couple of years we’ve found there’s a demand for services here that we were offering back in Europe when we were dealing with distressed projects. Banks have released significant funding to the market and they don’t know when they’re going to get their money back or whether it has gone to the project they’ve funded. Has it funded other projects that the contractor or indeed the de30
veloper has started? So one of our growth areas in the last 18 months has been in that area of due diligence of projects. When did you come to the Middle East? I came out here at the back end of 2008. At that stage we were predominantly an Irish business and it’s only in the last few years we started to expand into the International market. Unfortunately 2008 was when everything fell off a cliff. We had two options: to go home or to stay. So we moved our focus to Abu Dhabi but that never really took off. We were faced with a number of tough choices. Whether to develop locally within the UAE or branch out. We decided to look at Bahrain which was going well at the time but at the end of 2009 that went through a difficult period as well. Saudi Arabia was still going strong so we got involved there on a large KAUST university project supporting them on the cost and the close out of some of the major contracts with Saudi Oger and Saudi Binladin. That gave us
// construction business news me // February 2017