Egypt's construction giant Orascom to hand out $27m as 2020 dividends

Dubai: Orascom Construction, one of the Middle East’s biggest names in projects, will be issuing dividends of $27 million (at $0.2313 a share) for 2020 after recording $197.8 million as profit before tax. Revenues for the year – during which its US project portfolio showed strong gains – were at $3.4 billion.

This is the fourth straight year the Cairo-headquartered Orascom Construction will be paying out dividends, and will be the “first of two expected installments”.

New contracts signed in fourth quarter of 2020 include that for Cairo Metro, while in the US, it signed new ones totalling $920 million last year. Of these, $350 million were added in the final three months of the year.

BESIX, the contractor in which Orascom Construction holds 50 per cent, helped out with a “profitable second-half” 2020 and a backlog of 4.2 billion euros, “indicating its ability to overcome challenges encountered across certain projects during first-half 2020,” a statement said. (BESIX distributed a dividend of 10 million euros in June last to Orascom.)

Sizeable backlog

“We delivered on our commitment to secure ample backlog comprised of high-quality projects as we maintained our backlog at $5.4 billion as of December 31, 2020, in-line with the level achieved the previous year,” said Osama Bishai, CEO, in a statement. “Our new awards ranged across core sectors such as transportation, infrastructure, data centers and logistics, and complement our existing backlog.”

Last year, the company also initiated work on a monorail project in Egypt and said to be the world’s longest such. It was also first full year of operation for the Ras Ghareb Build-Own-Operate wind farm, “demonstrating our commitment to creating a portfolio of recurring income projects comprised of infrastructure investments and operation and maintenance contracts.”