Firms operating in the Middle East’s projects market are preparing for a slowdown in client spending from 2016 onwards.

Neil Reynolds, senior vice-president and managing director at CH2M Hill in the Middle East, said 2015 was of less concern, due to current workloads.

“My greater concern would be going into 2016-18. And of course we are thinking of ways to mitigate that. It could be diversification into some new markets, or going deeper in some of our markets like Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, which appears to be moving a bit,” he said.

If a slowdown emerges next year in the projects market, as many expect, there will be more pressure on costs, particularly if the market becomes more competitive due to the reduced number of contracts available.

To counter this, Reynolds said the company was trying to focus clients on the need for innovation. “We prefer to see more partnering arrangements… where designers, clients, contractors work together on the solution, and through that you drive down cost and have pain/gain share arrangements where it gets everyone working as a team in a less adversarial manner,” he told MEED.

“Because just driving down cost normally means it’s going to become adversarial at some point and everyone’s working towards change orders as opposed to the solution.”