The AIM-listed infrastructure group InfraStrata (AIM:INFA) have just done an exclusive interview with London South East. This coincides with an RNS release announcing that the company have received the long-promised, 1.13M grant money from the EU’s Innovation and Networks Agency.
Joining us online, CEO John Wood gave London South East an in-depth operational update, emphasising the synergies between the Belfast shipyard Harland & Wolff and the County Antrim-based gas storage project. John Wood said that when Islandmagee gets the go-ahead he expects to commission and construct £45M worth of large modules at the yard each year for two years, and have them moved by sea to the Islandmagee gas storage site.
“Going forwards”, said Wood, “the Harland & Wolff facility with two large dry docks gives us the capability to work across six different markets. We hope to be running at 80% capacity generating turnover of £400M revenues.” “Defence offers us an ideal opportunity as there are two large defence programmes in the UK, a third one on the way, and the two existing providers don’t have enough capacity, so there’s an ideal opportunity there to get involved” he said. Across the cruise sector there are numerous vessels now looking for dockings, the yard has 16 tenders out at the moment, and believe they will win business. “Although nothing is signed as yet, we remain hopeful of cruise line business.
Our projection for the yard was always break even by the end of this year, and that’s still where we want to be” he added. “The uplift we expect at the end of the year will more than compensate for the delays which we have had due to Covid.” “Our unweighted pipeline is about 1.8 billion at the moment, our weighted one is at £821M over the next five years. The job now is to turn that into firm orders and contracts”.
Over that time frame InfraStrata hope to contribute 1500 jobs to the Northern Irish economy. Turning to Islandmagee and gas storage, this has been discussed at No 10 by John and his team, and he believes that they have now future proofed the environmental impact of the project by introducing real time off-shore monitoring into the process. Wood explained he looked at the Marine Licence work which had been done previously, and more or less started again.
He is hoping a decision on the Marine Licence will be made by DEARA and signed off by the Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs Minister Edwin Poots within a month or six weeks. “Covid taking priority obviously, we are still hopeful of that decision.”
