After originally establishing itself in Kuwait in 1984, Bahrain-based Projacs International has grown to become the only Middle East-based pan-Arab project management firm.

“We have covered every city in the Arab world, everywhere from Morocco to Kuwait and in between,” says the company’s CEO, Luay Khoury.

Over the past 30 years, the region has moved ahead with a wide range of projects for the company to work on. And in the past five years, its diversity kept Projacs busy when key markets such as Dubai experienced a severe slowdown in construction activity.

“The good thing about our work in this region and our network of offices is that one office will make up for the loss in another office for different reasons,” says Khoury. “When Dubai was hit by the financial crisis in 2008, we were already in Qatar. Qatar was a haven for us and it is still one of our best revenue-generating offices. When we were hit in areas as the political problems started in North Africa, Syria and Lebanon, our work in Saudi Arabia began to grow in an exponential way. We are still really busy in Saudi Arabia.”

Diverse portfolio

The work in the Middle East is supplemented by work outside the region, and Projacs has worked on embassies and diplomatic missions and complexes in Spain, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Germany and Italy. “We have experience in working on projects that are owned by Arab governments or funded by Arab governments. For example, we worked on Kuwait-funded projects in Sarajevo in Bosnia and Guinea in Africa,” says Khoury.

The company also has exposure to the US market, as Projacs has a stake in a boutique project management company based in Boston, called Trident.

Traditionally, the bulk of Projacs’ work has been on a broad spectrum of building projects. These include corporate offices, hotels, hospitals, government buildings, banks and housing programmes. More recently, it has worked on sporting facilities for the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, and is still working for the Qatar Olympics Committee and its new sports projects.

“Sector-wise, we are in buildings as opposed to infrastructure, although we have done several infrastructure projects, especially when we work on city programmes, where there are major infrastructure components,” says Khoury. “We work on some roads projects, but compared with our portfolio of building [work] it is still a small percentage,”

The good thing about our work in this region is that one office will make up for the loss in another

Luay Khoury, CEO, Projacs International

In the future, Projacs sees itself playing a greater role in regional infrastructure projects. “We have developed this expertise in building projects and that market has plateaued. We think it is time [to] focus on infrastructure, because after the financial crisis governments have focused spending more on infrastructure projects,” says Khoury.

“The reason we did not focus on infrastructure in the past is that most of these projects did not lend themselves to project management services. There was the contract and the design, and the designer did everything. Now, there are different types of procurement methods, and we are having success with some of these projects and starting to get busy.”

Khoury says that Projacs can leverage its local know-how with an international partner’s expertise. “We are teaming up with several companies – Canada’s EXP, France’s Tractebel Engineering, DMC of [South] Korea and Korea Rail, and WSP of the UK – so we are working with [companies from] Europe, Asia and North America.”

Staffing challenge

The new focus will mean Projacs will need to expand the close to 700-strong workforce it has across the region. “We need to attract resources, people that have experience, and that’s a challenge,” Khoury says.

Projacs will rely on its partners for specialist staffing. “At the moment, we are only hiring one or two leaders. We are depending on our strategic partners to provide the main or top-level resources for any project. We did not go deep into this issue, as what we provide is planning, scheduling, cost control and document control services, the kind of scope of service we do have the resources for, so the nature of the project becomes irrelevant.”

Projacs undertakes both public and private-sector work, with most contracts being signed with private companies. But Khoury says this dynamic is moving towards government-led projects. “Governments after the [financial] crisis and the Arab spring are spending more. They want to make up the difference for the local people. So a lot of investments in their own countries and their own projects for their own people started to materialise, so there is a trend to shift more on to big government projects than the private sector,” he says.

The increasing volumes of work mean there should be plenty of contracts for Projacs and its competitors. “The competition is not cutthroat,” says Khoury. “I think there are enough projects for everyone. You might not take the top-level work, but then work gets distributed among several others down the road.”