The head of WSP Global Inc. says the company’s most recent acquisition positions it as a world leader in the power and energy engineering space.
The Montreal-based engineering consulting firm announced last week that it will acquire Idaho-based Power Engineers Inc., one of the U.S.’s leading power delivery designers. It’s WSP’s fourth M&A (mergers and acquisitions) deal so far this year.
“With Power Engineers, we are essentially becoming the global leading engineering firm in the power and energy sectors,” Alexandre L’Heureux, president and chief executive officer of WSP, told BNN Bloomberg in a Thursday interview.
“Where we’re getting extremely excited is the cross-synergistic benefits of selling services across all of our sectors going forward.”
WSP’s core four business sectors are transportation and infrastructure, earth and environment, property and buildings, and energy, resources and industry, all of which have been strengthened by M&A deals in recent years, L’Heureux said.
And investors have seemingly taken to those moves – the stock is up more than 20 per cent year to date. When it comes to the company’s growth strategy, L’Heureux said that growing organically has also been an important part of the firm’s success.
“I’ve said to our investor base for a number of years (that) our organic growth has been closely correlated to our M&A growth,” he said.
“If you look at our (second quarter) results … we recorded seven per cent organic growth, so historically we have seen a big portion of our growth coming from organic growth and equally from M&A growth and I don’t expect that to change anytime soon.”
L’Heureux added that in the near term, he expects WSP to be heavily involved in projects related to the clean energy transition, which he said is “top of mind” for the firm’s clients.
“Just look at the hyperscalers right now; significantly investing in data centres, and we all know that data centres are consuming 10 to 20 times more energy than regular buildings and assets,” he said.
“I do feel that really the opportunity for us to jump into this market and be in a position to really bring this expertise to all of our other sectors …. (will create) tremendous opportunities for us going forward.”
