Construção estradas na Polónia deu lucro

mas não foi para as construtoras. Para demasiadas, o resultado foram falências. Fica um artigo do Financial Times sobre o assunto:

" There was an old adage during the gold rush that the guy running the grocery shop and the saloon made a killing, while prospectors lost their shirts. It seems that the same principle applies to the humbler world of road building and asphalt supplies.

As the dust settles on Poland’s ambitious road building programme it turns out that somebody did make money on building hundreds of kilometres of new highways. It just wasn’t the people building the roads, but the companies making the asphalt – Poland’s two largest refiners, PKN Orlen and the Lotos Group.

The Dziennik Gazeta Prawna newspaper estimates that the two companies earned about 12bn zlotys ($630m) during 2008-2011, the peak of Poland’s road construction programme. Asphalt profits jumped by 61 per cent for Orlen and by 75 per cent for Lotos over that period.

That record is a lot better than for the companies which were actually laying the asphalt. More than 150 construction companies have declared bankruptcy, largely because they engaged in a destructive race to the bottom in competing for big construction contracts.

Construction firms hoped that they would be able to get some wiggle room in their contracts in the event of increases in the price of raw materials, but the government’s road building agency has proved inflexible, worrying that any renegotiation of contracts could imperil the flow of EU structural funds which cover the bulk of big road projects.

The agency warned bidders a few years ago to be careful about their assumptions on future prices for inputs like steel, gravel, cement and asphalt, pointing out that once the infrastructure modernisation programme got rolling the increased demand would push up costs.

The agency was right to worry – just this year asphalt prices have risen by 42 per cent. That has pushed many construction companies to the wall.

“Problems with the construction sector are in large part the result of the dominant position of the customer, in this case the state and its institutions. Until that changes – and as we can see public institutions are not taking much responsibility for the existing situation – the sector does not have much chance of rebuilding its potential,” notes a recent report by Euler Hermes, a credit insurer.

The impact can be seen on the Warsaw Stock Exchange’s construction sector index, which is down by 31.6 per cent over the last 12 months.

Orlen, by contrast, is up by 23 per cent over the last year, while Lotos is up by 35 per cent over the same period – black gold indeed."

Fonte: http://blogs.ft.com