<div>Design firms are operating at 94% capacity, the highest since 2011.</div>

Prague - The production capacities of project companies in the Czech Republic are utilized at 94%, the highest in the last four years. On average, they have signed contracts for projects for the next six months. Four out of ten directors of these companies plan to accept loss-making contracts this year. This follows from the latest Quarterly Analysis of the Czech Construction Industry, which was prepared by the analytical company CEEC Research based on a survey among a hundred domestic project firms.

"The differences between the companies' responses according to their focus are minimal regarding utilization," said CEEC Research director Jiří Vacek. Companies that focus more on building construction had a utilization rate of 93%, while those engaged in engineering construction had 97%. "Our capacities are currently utilized almost to the max, and the amount of work in comparison to previous years is at a very decent level," added Martin Drotár, director of Centroprojekt Group.

Project companies currently have signed contracts for projects on average for the next six months. For 37% of companies, this represents a year-on-year increase in the number of projects, while 44% of companies are in a similar situation as last year. Only about one-fifth of them report a decrease. "In recent years, design offices have been forced to lay off their employees due to a lack of projects and low prices. This unfavorable trend is slowly starting to change. There are more projects available, but the prices for design work remain low, which occasionally reflects in the quality of the project processing,” said Daniel Beneš, sales manager for the Czech Republic and Slovakia at Saint-Gobain Construction Products.

Of the contracts that project companies carried out last year, 11% were loss-making. Four out of ten directors of project firms plan to accept such contracts this year as well. They most often cite maintaining long-term cooperation as the reason. Maintaining the current market share is not as significant for the directors. "Our company essentially does not engage in dumping prices. Therefore, loss-making contracts constitute a minimal share in our portfolio," added Petr Ščurkevič, director of the Ground Construction Design division at K4.