Strategies for contractors to sustain growth in the global construction market

Over the last decade, the international construction industry has changed drastically in many ways, including: the terms of competition rules and delivery systems for the selection of contractors, financial resource diversity, leading contractors in the revenue rankings, the key products and new emerging markets. This paper investigates the important changes for global contractors through various documentation analyses as well as in-depth interviews with 80 industry experts. This paper then analyzes the common strategies and lessons obtained from the cases of leading global contractors that have sustained their growth in the competitive global construction during the last decade. It was found that those firms were quite proactive and responsive to changing markets by increasing their overseas revenues and enhancing their competency through more diversified products in order to stabilize their revenue structure. In addition, they significantly increased their upstream/downstream functional capabilities; hence becoming more competent service providers, able to grow in these rapidly changing market conditions. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.