Atkins Middle East MD Richard Barrett has been in the job for just a year. “The first quarter has so far been very, very encouraging,” he says. “We have managed to secure a couple of big projects on the infrastructure side, and we are currently in the process of mobilising teams to work on them.”
One of these is the King Abdul Aziz International Airport expansion project in Jeddah, worth about $80m, and won with the help of Atkins’ latest acquisition in the US, PBSJ. The other contract secured is for work on the Etihad rail project, where Atkins has been contracted to carry out the concept and preliminary design for 1,200km of freight rail connecting the seven emirates, valued at around $20m.
Notably, these projects are different to those which originally made Atkins so famous in the Middle East, the biggest, of course, being the Burj Al Arab.
Barrett joined Atkins in 1983 after graduating from the University of Nottingham in the UK, but has been present in the Middle East since April 2010.
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