Dundee construction firm Muirfield Contracts has been bought out by a private equity firm which is entering the building trade for the first time.
Azure Investments which has offices in Edinburgh, Dubai and Singapore has spent the past three months negotiating over a deal to purchase the Camperdown Industrial Park based company.
The move, which has been completed for an undisclosed sum, will allow founder and managing director Maurice McKay to retire from the business in the months ahead following a handover with his newly appointed successor Lindsay Cowan.
Mr McKay will retain ties with the firm after his retiral in a new role as joint chairman along with John Stodart of Azure. All 350 staff are being kept on under the new management arrangement.
“It is a fantastic opportunity for lots of reasons,” Mr Stodart said.
“For us, Muirfield had a fantastically strong foundation which we can build upon. From its reputation and pipeline of work, it has everything that so many businesses don’t have.
“Maurice has done remarkably well to go through crises and grow the business.
“That is a business you want to be associated with and when you look and see everything that is happening in Dundee and Tayside, all of the growth here, then it had all of the right ingredients for us.
“It will be business as usual but with a slant on growth. We will take 90 days to an understanding of the business although we have been really close to it for three months already and then we’ll kick-in our growth plan,” he said.
The latest published company accounts for the year to October 2011 show Muirfield achieved a pre-tax profit of £2.06 million on turnover of £41.8m.
It is understood that revenues increased significantly last year to around £47m, despite the continuing economic crunch within the construction industry.
Mr McKay, who founded the business with former colleague Jim Ross in 1988, said he was pleased that Muirfield was entering a new era and the company’s future had been secured.
“They think there is lots of potential within construction and that construction is going to come out of recession, and that Muirfield is an excellent vehicle through which to facilitate their plans and aspiration to build,” Mr McKay told The Courier.
“There is an opportunity for development and growth, and the existing staff will obviously have the opportunity to share in that. That is one of the attractions of the new owners; it is not a smash and grab.”
New managing director Lindsay Cowan previously regional MD for Mansell Tayside & Fife said it was a case of “business as usual”, but the firm would be looking for new opportunities to grow in the months ahead.
Muirfield is involved in a number of contracts across sectors including care, education, housing and commercial property. High-profile contracts include the refurbishment of publisher DC Thomson & Co’s Meadowside headquarters in Dundee.
“There is a lot of bad press at the moment about construction in general, so for somebody to be investing in a company like Muirfield is terrific news,” Mr Cowan said.
“Moving forward it will be about developing and expanding the business. Muirfield’s reputation is first class already but we want that reputation to spread across the whole of Scotland.”