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Skanska profits double but fail to beat forecasts

Swedish construction and civil engineering group Skanska announced Thursday its net profit doubled in the first quarter year-on-year, but its residential sector performed poorly.

Published: 10 May 2012 16:57 CEST

For the January-March period, Skanska doubled its group net profit to 264 million kronor ($38.3 million) from 132 million a year earlier.

The result however fell far short of the 393 million kronor analysts polled by the Dow Jones Newswires had expected to see.

Skanska’s sales meanwhile jumped 19 percent to 27.2 billion kronor from 25.9 billion in the year-ago period, while the Swedish company said its order bookings had jumped 16 percent year-on-year to 25.1 billion.

Its order backlog meanwhile grew 10 percent to 152.9 billion kronor.

“This meant that order backlog on March 31 represented 16 months of construction,” Skanska chief executive Johan Karlström pointed out in the earnings report.

However, the company acknowledged it was disappointed by its performance in the residential sector, where it doubled its operating losses to 48 million kronor, even though sales in the sector grew 22 percent to 1.2 billion.

“First of all, the performance in our Residential Development business is clearly unacceptable,” Karlström said, pointing out that “the result was significantly lower than last year, primarily due to negative earnings in the Swedish residential operations.”

Going forward, the Skanska chief stressed that “the market outlook for our US operations is expected to develop favourably and the Nordic market as a whole is stable.”

“The market outlook for our other European countries is weaker,” he acknowledged.

Following the news, the company saw its share price fall 5.22 percent in late afternoon trading on a Stockholm stock exchange up 0.84 percent.

AFP/The Local

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Was Norway ill prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic?

Photo by Eirik Skarstein on Unsplash

The 450-page report was submitted to Prime Minister Erna Solberg by medical professor Stener Kvinnsland, who led the review.

The commission found that, generally, Norway had handled the pandemic well compared to the rest of Europe. That was in part due to citizens taking infection control measures on board.

“After a year of pandemic, Norway is among the countries in Europe with the lowest mortality and lowest economic impact. The authorities could not have succeeded if the population had not supported the infection control measures;” the report states.

However, the commission’s report also outlined that Norway did not properly prepare itself for the pandemic.

“The authorities knew that a pandemic was the most likely national crisis to have the most negative consequences. Nevertheless, they were not prepared when the extensive and serious Covid-19 pandemic came,” it said.

Prime Minister Erna Solberg said during an interview with the commission, conducted as part of its work, that the government did not have an infection control strategy of its own.

“We had a ‘we have to deal with a difficult situation’ strategy. We had to do everything we could to gain control and get the infection down. It was really only at the end of March (2020) that we found the more long-term strategy,” she told the commission.

Low stocks of personal protective equipment were another source of criticism in the report.

“The government knew that it would in all probability be difficult to obtain infection control equipment in the event of a pandemic. Nevertheless, the warehouses were almost empty,” Kvinnsland said at a press conference.

Norwegian health authorities were praised for the swiftness with which they implemented infection control measures. But the commission said that the decision should have been formally made by the government, rather than the Norwegian Directorate of Health.

READ MORE: Norway saw fewer hospital patients in 2020 despite pandemic

The implementation of restrictions in March 2020 was critiqued for failing to ensure that “infection control measures were in line with the constitution and human rights.”

One-fifth of municipalities in Norway lacked a functioning plan in the event of a pandemic according to the report, and the government did not provide enough support to municipalities.

“We believe that government paid too little attention to the municipalities. The municipalities were given much larger tasks than they could have prepared for,” Kvinnsland said.

The report was also critical of Norway’s lack of a plan for dealing with imported infections in autumn 2020.

“The government lacked a plan to deal with imported infections when there was a new wave of infections in Europe in the autumn of 2020,” the report found.

“When the government eased infection control measures towards the summer of 2020, they made many assessments individually. The government did not consider the sum of the reliefs and it had no plan to deal with increasing cross-border infection,” it added.

The report also concluded that Norway allowed itself to be too easily lobbied by business when deciding to ease border restrictions last summer.

The division of roles in handling aspects of the pandemic was scrutinised in the report. Here, the division of responsibilities between the Ministry of Health and Care Services, The Norwegian Directorate of Health and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health were unclear.

The prime minister has asked the commission to continue its work.

“We are not done with the pandemic yet. Therefore, it is natural that the commission submits a final report. There will also be topics where the learning points can only be drawn later,” Solberg said.

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