5 Jul 2007

Interserve Plc, the services, maintenance and building group, today provides an update on the first half of 2007 in advance of announcing its interim results on 5th September 2007.

The Group continues to trade strongly in markets which remain generally buoyant.  A strong operational performance, including further progress in integrating our expanded facilities services businesses, has been complemented by continued success in winning and mobilising several significant new contracts. These clearly exemplify Interserve's strategy of delivering services at each stage of the asset life cycle and demonstrate the success of our integrated service offering in developing and retaining clients.

In the education sector we were awarded both the £60 million Plymouth Schools PFI project and the Leeds Building Schools for the Future contract, where construction value in the first wave alone is estimated at £240 million; facilities management services will boost this figure and further waves are expected over the next 10 years. We were named preferred bidder for two further schools PFI projects in Northern Ireland, Derry Schools and Down & Connor, and are now involved in a total of six educational PFI schemes in the Province.

In defence we won the £40 million Air-side Platform Works contract to design and build aircraft parking stands for future aircraft fleets at RAF Brize Norton, stemming from the facilities management work that we carry out in the South East Regional Prime contract.  

In health, our progress in Welsh Health Estates' Designed for Life: Building for Wales framework programme has been excellent, with a series of contract wins which are expected to yield revenue of more than £200 million over the next few years.  Meanwhile in infrastructure we won a place on the Environment Agency's £500 million framework programme covering flood defence, waterways and water resources capital works over the next four years, and in retail we have won contracts to provide integrated FM services to the new Silverburn centre in Glasgow and the Crowngate centre in Worcester, and with Abbey to service over 350 branches throughout north and central England.

Our £150 million, seven-year contract with the Metropolitan Police, which we won by leveraging the strength of our extended capabilities resulting from last year's acquisition of MacLellan, is now fully mobilised.  We also mobilised our stewarding contract at Wembley, where, amongst other events, we played a key role in managing a capacity crowd of almost 90,000 at the new stadium's inaugural FA Cup final and the 63,000 audience at the recent concert in celebration of the life of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Internationally, we completed the acquisition of Madina Group in Qatar. In Equipment Services, the start-up operation in South Africa is making encouraging progress and, despite weakness in Australasian markets, the division is well placed to meet our expectations for the full year.

Adrian Ringrose, Chief Executive, commented, "Given the good trading conditions and the performance of our businesses, we continue to be confident about the outlook for the full year."