Multiplex: highs and lows Down Under

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Each week Arabian Business turns the spotlight on a leading company.

Don't they make car windscreens?

They're slightly more ambitious than that. Multiplex is an Australian-based group of property and construction companies notable for its work on a series of high-profile projects, including the Burj Dubai, which just recently broke the record for having more floors than any other building in the world.

Just how high is that?

Burj Dubai has overtaken previous record holder Taipei 101 in Taiwan, which stands at 509 metres. For those of us who like to visualise things, that's the equivalent of perching on the Leaning Tower of Pisa on top of the Eiffel Tower, on top of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Sounds like a surrealist nightmare...

The construction has been anything but a nightmare. While there has been the odd conflagration (workers rioted on the site back in March last year, complaining of low wages and poor working conditions), health and safety officials recently celebrated completing 15 million accident-free man hours. The project is comfortably on schedule, and is set to be completed and occupied in 2009.

Good old Multiplex. They must be the toast of the construction world!

It's a little more complicated than that, as Nasa Multiplex, the UAE-Australian joint venture construction company that is working on the Burj tower, is proving considerably more adept than some of Multiplex's other companies.

They're struggling, are they?

Well, the group's most high-profile fiasco so far has been the US$1.6bn redevelopment of London's Wembley Stadium, which was completed in March this year. With 90,000 seats it is the most expensive stadium ever built and the largest in the world with every seat undercover.

Sounds impressive. Why the controversy?

The problem is that the stadium was supposed to have been finished in 2005. There were problems from day one - rising costs, dodgy steelwork, a collapsing roof, and buckling sewers, to name but a few of the glitches. At one point, all work stopped on the site after Multiplex was told that if it did not hand over US$45m a sniper would target crane operators.

What happened to the sniper?

He never turned up, apparently and the deadline passed without incident. Still, the Wembley debacle meant that the company lost almost US$300m on the project before tax.

Ouch. So what's in store for the company now it has washed its hands off Wembley?

Multiplex has received a US$6.1bn takeover offer from Canada-based Brookfield Asset Management. Brookfield, which manages assets worth about US$50bn and is one of Manhattan's biggest office property landlords, already holds about 4% of Multiplex's shares, and is expected to secure the 50% slice it needs for the takeover to succeed.

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