Ardmac, the international construction specialist headquartered in Dublin, has announced that it has taken a significant equity investment in Cental, a leading and fast-growth provider of advanced modular infrastructure to the Data Centre, Utilities and Telecoms industries. Established over five years ago, Cental has enjoyed impressive growth to date with annualised revenues of €20m.
With this latest strategic investment by Ardmac, the Carlow -based business is now set for further growth and is projecting to double its workforce to 140 people over the next 24 months. The announcement represents a major boost for the local economy in such challenging times.
The combined expertise and resources resulting from this development will enhance Ardmac’s capabilities as a leading provider of offsite modular solutions to its clients in the Data Centre, Pharmaceutical, Healthcare and Advanced Manufacturing sectors, whilst opening up new solutions for Commercial Fit-out clients.
Commenting on this latest development for Ardmac, Ronan Quinn, CEO for the company, said: “This investment in Cental provides Ardmac with a reputable specialist partner, additional manufacturing capacity and a further foothold in the market for offsite modular construction. In Cental, we now have that crucial manufacturing fabrication infrastructure that provides the expertise and capacity required to deliver complex high value projects offsite and then deliver them to our customer locations. We are very excited to leverage the synergies in place between our two companies.”
Cental's board
Brian McGuire CEO of Cental said: “We are delighted to welcome Ardmac as strategic partners. Our combined engineering and management teams will further enhance our already ambitious growth strategy. We look forward to doubling our 70 strong engineering team to deliver this growth, into new and existing vertical and geographical markets.”
Cental’s manufacturing capability will support Ardmac’s recently announced agreement with US based Germfree Laboratories, to provide prefabricated turnkey modular cleanrooms and biosafety laboratories to the BioPharma and Healthcare sectors throughout Europe. It also provides a manufacturing base for all other Ardmac modular solutions under one roof.
Ardmac’s CEO Ronan Quinn added: “The construction ecosystem of the future will be a more standardised, consolidated and integrated construction process where modular assemblies and entire modular buildings will be much more common. Our recent transactions with Germfree and Cental position us to be a significant provider of such prefabricated solutions for Lifescience and Advanced Manufacturing applications.”
Ardmac’s legal advisors on the deal with Cental were Holmes O’Malley Sexton with Focus Tax Partners providing tax support.
