Practice posts pre-tax loss of £1.9m on revenue of £49.9m

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Source: AHMM

AHMM’s One Portwall Square office development in Bristol, which now serves as the practice’s base in the city

AHMM has made a pre-tax loss for the third year running despite increasing its turnover by 14%, the practice’s just-published accounts for the year to March 2023 have revealed.

According to the documents, the firm made a loss of £1.9m in 2022-23, up from a pre-tax loss of £1m in 2021-22 and a pre-tax loss of £503,484 the year before.

Conversely, revenue increased in the year to March 2023 – hitting £49.9m, up from £43.8m in 2021-22 and £43.3m in 2020-21.

A breakdown of revenue by region showed that UK work accounted for £43.0m, with £1.0m from Europe and £5.8m ascribed to “rest of world”. The practice flagged growing work in North America in particular.

A group strategic report accompanying the latest figures cited Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine as having a significant impact on prices for construction materials and labour, as well as driving higher energy costs.

“These factors, in conjunction with the Bank of England’s decision to increase interest rates as a means of countering the jump in inflation have adversely impacted some of our clients’ financial assessments of their projects, causing some to be paused indefinitely or else their start to be deferred for a period,” the report said.

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Source: AHMM

AHMM’s conversion of the Royal London Hospital at Whitechapel into the new town hall for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets completed in 2022-23

It added that changes to Building Regulations in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster and “greater scrutiny and political pressure” in relation to the carbon impact of new-build projects versus refurbishment were also factors that impacted on clients’ “willingness to proceed with certain projects”.

AHMM said that its average full-time-equivalent headcount in 2022-23 was 487, up by 20 on the previous year. It said there were 551 staff on its payroll in March 2023.

The report noted that in the six months after the 2022-23 accounting year, AHMM had started a planned 20% reduction of its workforce, along with a review of spending across all parts of the business. It added that the practice had triggered a break clause in one of its studios that would cut 25% of its UK studio space from this year.

The practice, which became an employee ownership trust in 2017, said no provision was made for 2022-23 profit-share payments.

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