Saturday, 14 May 2022 | 17.7°C Belfast
N I concrete company’s performance rallies in 2021 with turnover up from £259m to £342m
Northern Ireland concrete giant FP McCann has staged a major recovery with pre-tax profits reaching £33m after it was forced to pay a £25m penalty to the competition watchdog in 2020.
T urnover at the firm, which is based in Magherafelt, picked up from £259m to £342m.
The company’s activities cover building and civil engineering, quarrying, housebuilding and the manufacture of pre-cast concrete products.
Analysing 2021 turnover, the accounts said £55.5m was derived from construction, £286.6m from the manufacture of construction products and £10,000 from jointly-controlled operations.
The remainder of the £342m was generated from other significant revenue, which included £442,781 from the government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS).
There was a slight decrease in the company’s pay bills for its employees, from £65m to £63.7m.
In 2020, the year in which its penalty was paid, profit of £23m had been wiped out by the £25.4m fine from the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA). That led to an overall £8.3m loss.
The company received the hefty fine after a CMA finding that over seven years until 2013, FP McCann and two other concrete product firms had agreed to fix or co-ordinate their prices, shared the GB market by allocating customers and regularly exchanged competitively sensitive information. The other companies were fined £7m and £4m.
Former company directors Eoin McCann and Francis McCann were disqualified as directors for 12 years and 11 years respectively over their involvement.
In a strategic report filed with the latest accounts, the company describes itself as “a family business with over 40 years experience in the construction industry”.
It added: “We have continued to invest in our products and our people, and are very confident that this strategy will ensure that the company will be able to capitalise on the growing demand from the construction industry to provide modular solutions to meet its needs in an environment of a declining skilled labour market.”
Over the 12 months, exact employee numbers fell from 1,630 to 1,592.
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