BAM and VolkerWessels: Dutch Contractors After the Mega-Project Losses

Dutch contractors are earning more than they have in two decades because they finally stopped bidding for the projects that nearly destroyed them. Between 2009 and 2020 BAM and VolkerWessels learned, at a cost of hundreds of millions of euros, that fixed-price contracts for one-off engineering feats such as the world’s largest sea lock are a wager with asymmetric downside. The recovery that followed, built on maintenance, housing, energy-transition work and strict selection of risk, has produced record profits at BAM and Heijmans and a once-unthinkable change of ownership at VolkerWessels. This article explains what went wrong, how each company responded, and why the next test is a shrinking national infrastructure budget. It is part of the Netherlands Company Stories hub.

What were the mega-project losses that defined Dutch contracting in the 2010s?

The defining disasters were a handful of fixed-price, design-and-build contracts where the contractor took geotechnical, engineering and schedule risk that no bid margin could cover. The most expensive for the Dutch industry was the new sea lock at IJmuiden, the largest in the world at 500 metres long and 70 metres wide, awarded in 2015 to the OpenIJ consortium of BAM and VolkerWessels for about €500 million. Design problems with the lock’s caissons and foundations pushed completion from 2019 to January 2022, and both partners booked provisions that the Dutch press reported at well over €100 million each.

BAM’s international record was worse. The collapse of the Cologne city archive in 2009, during metro tunnelling by a consortium that included BAM’s German subsidiary Wayss & Freytag, killed two people and led to more than a decade of litigation. In Ireland, the National Children’s Hospital in Dublin, which BAM Contractors began building in 2017, ran over budget by more than €1.4 billion and missed, by one count, 18 consecutive completion deadlines, making it one of the most expensive hospitals ever built. In the UK, problems at Manchester’s Co-op Live arena cost BAM’s construction arm £19.5 million in 2024, and the group also took losses on an offshore wind foundation project in Germany. Each of these taught the same lesson: in a one-off structure the client’s engineers, the contractor’s engineers and the ground itself can all be wrong, and the contractor pays.

VolkerWessels was more selective abroad but had its own legacy. In January 2026 Dutch prosecutors sought €525,000 in fines from two dormant subsidiaries, Volker Construction International and Volker Stevin Caribbean, over alleged bribery of a Sint Maarten minister between 2009 and 2014 in connection with a bridge contract, a case that had taken the fiscal investigation service nearly a decade to bring.

How did BAM write off its past and rebuild its margins?

BAM’s turnaround began with a decision to stop being an international contractor. In 2020, amid the pandemic, the group announced it would wind down BAM International, the division that had built ports and hospitals from Tanzania to Indonesia with about 600 staff, and cut up to 150 jobs in the UK. In September 2021 it sold its German businesses, with about €500 million of annual turnover, to Zech Group and the Gustav Zech Foundation. The strategy that replaced them, “Building a sustainable tomorrow”, concentrated on three home markets and on recurring work: road and rail maintenance, housing, defence, and the energy transition.

The financial results of that choice arrived in 2025. Revenue rose 9 per cent to €7.04 billion, adjusted EBITDA increased from €333 million to €400 million, lifting the margin from 5.2 to 5.7 per cent, and net result attributable to shareholders jumped from €82 million to €211 million. BAM proposed a dividend of €0.30 per share, up from €0.25, and kept the order book at €13.0 billion. The group also strengthened its balance sheet enough to complete a €40 million share buyback in July 2026, and in June 2026 its shares were added to the STOXX Europe 600 index, a recognition that would have seemed implausible when the stock traded below €2 in 2020.

The first half of 2026 extended the trend: revenue of €3.5 billion, up 3 per cent, adjusted EBITDA of €240 million, up 36 per cent, a margin of 6.9 per cent, net profit of €127 million and earnings per share of €0.49 against €0.39 a year earlier. Cash stood at €715 million, up from €501 million, and the order book at €12.6 billion. Joosten attributed the improvement to a stronger portfolio with higher profitability in both the Netherlands and the UK and Ireland, growth in energy transition, Dutch residential and defence work, and strict cost discipline. BAM guided to a full-year adjusted EBITDA margin of at least 6.5 per cent, against a medium-term target it had once set at 5 per cent.

Why did the Wessels family take VolkerWessels off the stock exchange in 2020?

Because the family concluded that public markets undervalued a construction group and complicated long-term decisions. VolkerWessels, built from the merger of Kondor Wessels and Volker Stevin in 1997 and headquartered in Rijssen, floated on Euronext Amsterdam in May 2017 at €23 a share, with Reggeborgh, the Wessels family’s investment vehicle, retaining 63.5 per cent. The listing was meant to give the group a currency for acquisitions and liquidity for the family after the 2017 death of its patriarch Dik Wessels.

The shares never traded convincingly above the issue price, and the IJmuiden lock provisions and a weak 2018 pushed them lower. In November 2019 Reggeborgh offered to buy the 36.5 per cent it did not own, at €22.20 a share, in a deal that valued the minority at a sum reported at roughly €650 million, and the offer completed in 2020. Henry Holterman, Reggeborgh’s chief executive, argued then and later that construction is a long-cycle business in which quarterly reporting, analyst coverage and activist pressure add cost without adding value. Delisting also freed VolkerWessels from having to disclose project provisions in real time, a point its listed rivals noted with some envy.

The private years were productive. VolkerWessels expanded in the UK through VolkerFitzpatrick and VolkerRail, in Canada and the United States, and in German road building, and it industrialised housing through the MorgenWonen factory, which assembles a complete home in a day. In 2024 it sold three specialist businesses, Visser & Smit Hanab, VW Telecom and Homij, to the private-equity firm Triton, a first sign that the family was simplifying the portfolio.

Why is VolkerWessels now being sold to HAL and Boskalis?

Because the family decided that the Dutch construction market was consolidating and that a patient, cash-rich owner could do more with the business than a family holding spread across many sectors. On 7 March 2025 HAL Holding and its dredging subsidiary Boskalis signed a letter of intent with VolkerWessels; on 4 July 2025 Reggeborgh announced an agreement in principle; and on 15 October 2025 HAL confirmed it would acquire VolkerWessels Nederland, comprising the Construction & Real Estate Development and Infrastructure NL divisions based in Rijssen. According to HAL, those activities generated revenue of €3.6 billion and operating profit of €217 million in 2024. No price was disclosed, and the international operations in the UK, North America and Germany were excluded and remain with Reggeborgh.

The logic on HAL’s side is industrial. Boskalis, which HAL took private in 2022, is already active in Dutch road maintenance and civil works alongside its dredging business, and combining it with VolkerWessels’ infrastructure arm creates the largest civil contractor in the country, a natural counterparty for Rijkswaterstaat’s dike, lock and highway programmes. Boskalis’ own trajectory is described in Boskalis and Van Oord, the dredging giants. For Reggeborgh, Holterman said the sale fitted the expectation of further consolidation and that HAL’s reputation as a long-term, stable investor had been decisive. VolkerWessels chief executive Alfred Vos said the combination strengthened all the companies involved. Completion, subject to competition approval and works-council procedures, was expected in the first quarter of 2026.

The deal confirms a pattern: Dutch construction has moved from the stock exchange to a small set of long-horizon owners. BAM is the only large Dutch builder left on Euronext Amsterdam besides Heijmans, while VolkerWessels, Dura Vermeer, Ballast Nedam (owned by Turkey’s Rönesans since 2015) and now Boskalis are all in private hands. HAL, listed itself through HAL Trust, is the vehicle of the Van der Vorm family and is examined further in the context of Dutch family-controlled conglomerates.

How did Heijmans become the most profitable of the three?

By concentrating on Dutch housing and infrastructure at exactly the moment both became scarce. Heijmans, founded in Rosmalen in 1923 and led by Ton Hillen since 2016, nearly failed in 2017 after losses on the A9 motorway and other projects, and its recovery plan was the same as BAM’s: no more foreign work, no more unbounded risk. The 2023 acquisition of Van Wanrooij, a Brabant developer with a large land bank, gave it a pipeline of housing sites just as competitors were running short.

The 2025 results were the best in the company’s history. Revenue rose from €2.6 billion to €2.8 billion, underlying EBITDA from €199 million to €252 million, lifting the margin from 7.7 to 9.1 per cent, and profit after tax reached €130 million. The group moved from €10 million net debt to €58 million net cash, reported return on capital employed of 27.9 per cent, grew its order book from €2.8 billion to €3.7 billion and proposed a dividend of €2.37 per share. It sold 3,103 homes, slightly fewer than the 3,181 of 2024, which shows that the constraint was permits and land rather than buyers. All three segments, Living, Working and Connecting, performed above the 7 to 9 per cent strategic margin range.

The first half of 2026 brought revenue of €1.52 billion, up from €1.31 billion, underlying EBIT of €104 million at a 6.9 per cent margin, an order book of €4.1 billion and 1,506 homes sold. Heijmans switched its headline metric from EBITDA to EBIT and now guides to revenue of about €3.1 billion with an underlying EBIT margin approaching 7.3 per cent for 2026. It renewed a €210 million revolving credit facility in July 2026, won contracts to renovate Heerhugowaard prison and build an Army Technology Centre for the defence ministry, and in October 2026 was named Eindhoven Airport’s preferred construction partner through 2030.

What is BAM buying and selling in 2026, and why?

BAM is using its restored balance sheet to buy underground infrastructure capacity and sell what does not fit. On 8 October 2026 it agreed to acquire A.Hak, a specialist in pipelines, cables and underground networks that is central to the Dutch grid build-out and to hydrogen and heat networks. On 20 October 2026 it bought a 40 per cent stake in Van Leeuwen Sleufloze Technieken, a horizontal directional drilling firm, and agreed to sell Schakel & Schrale, its heritage-restoration subsidiary, to Arundo Beheer. Earlier in the year it launched a prefabricated plug-and-play electricity substation aimed at TenneT and the regional grid operators.

The direction is consistent: BAM wants exposure to the energy transition, where the Dutch state and the grid companies are committed to spending tens of billions of euros regardless of the political cycle, and to defence, where it won a squadron building for the Defence Helicopter Command in Den Helder in June 2026. Contract wins in the first half included the Rijen rail-zone transformation, an extension of Rabobank’s Utrecht campus and almost €100 million of asphalt maintenance for The Hague and Moerdijk. Governance is also changing: CFO Henri de Pater joined the executive board in May 2025, Paul Hamer joined the supervisory board in May 2026, and Bob Elfring will succeed Henk Rottinghuis as chair on 1 January 2027.

Why is the infrastructure budget the industry’s next problem?

Because the Dutch state is simultaneously the industry’s largest client and its most constrained one. In May 2026 BCG estimated, in a study reported by Het Financieele Dagblad, that the Netherlands needs about €280 billion of infrastructure investment by 2040, roughly double the current budget, to clear deferred maintenance and upgrade post-war roads, bridges, locks and data connections. A parallel study by Arcadis and Berenschot for the infrastructure ministry found that municipalities and provinces already spend more than €4 billion a year on management and renewal, that repair costs to 2030 are 30 per cent above budget, and that the annual renewal budget must rise by €2.1 billion. The provinces’ infrastructure chair, Harry van der Maas of Zeeland, warned of more and longer road closures without extra money.

The 2027 budget presented in September 2026 went the other way. In October 2026 Amsterdam’s transport alderman warned of rising costs after the cabinet postponed the Zuidasdok tunnel and station project, provinces publicly criticised the national infrastructure programme for delaying key projects, and the cabinet ordered yet another study on financing the Lelylijn rail link to Groningen. Rijkswaterstaat’s replacement-and-renovation programme for bridges is the heart of the problem: the Merwedebrug on the A27 can no longer carry freight traffic, a survey in October 2026 found that at least ten Gelderland municipalities did not know whether their bridges were vulnerable, and cracks appeared on the Suurhoffbrug to Maasvlakte in September.

Heijmans’ Hillen has been the industry’s most vocal advocate. Presenting half-year results in July 2026 he argued that delaying infrastructure investment makes it twice as expensive, that heavier electric vehicles are wearing roads faster than the country is prepared for, and that the Maasbrug and Waalbrug are too narrow for their traffic. He acknowledged that more spending benefits Heijmans but said the economy will stall if goods can no longer move by road. The state’s wider fiscal choices, from the pension transition to the Groningen compensation bill, are discussed in the Groningen gas field closure story.

How do Dutch contractors compare with European peers?

They are smaller, more domestic and now more profitable than their size would suggest. BAM’s €7 billion of revenue is a fraction of Vinci’s €70 billion or Skanska’s SEK 180 billion, and its margins remain below the 8 to 10 per cent that concession-owning groups such as Vinci and Eiffage earn from toll roads and airports. Where BAM and Heijmans now compete is with pure contractors such as Skanska, Strabag and Balfour Beatty, and on that comparison a 6.9 per cent adjusted EBITDA margin at BAM and a 9.1 per cent EBITDA margin at Heijmans are respectable.

The structural difference is ownership. Across Europe the large builders are either listed with dispersed shareholders, as in France and Sweden, or family-controlled, as in Austria’s Strabag and Spain’s ACS. The Netherlands has moved decisively to the second model, and the arrival of HAL as owner of the country’s largest civil contractor extends the pattern, with implications explored in the UK Company Stories hub, where Balfour Beatty and Kier made the opposite choice.

What can founders and investors learn from BAM and VolkerWessels?

The first lesson is that growth bought with risk is not growth. BAM’s revenue in 2021 was €7.3 billion and its net profit €18 million; in 2025 revenue was lower in real terms and net profit was €211 million. Shrinking the addressable market to the projects a company can actually control produced more value than a decade of international expansion.

The second is that ownership structure should match the business cycle. The Wessels family concluded that a listed construction company is a poor fit for a business whose bad news arrives in lumps and whose good decisions take years to show, and the market’s reaction to the 2017 IPO suggested investors agreed. HAL, which can hold assets for decades, is the kind of owner construction rewards. Founders should ask not only how much capital they need but how long their investors can wait, a question that also animates the Randstad founder’s approach to control.

The third is that the public client is both the opportunity and the risk. The €280 billion infrastructure need, the €29 billion Delta Fund and the grid operators’ investment plans guarantee demand, but the cabinet’s 2026 postponements show that demand is political. Companies that diversify across the state’s spending lines, from dikes to data-centre grid connections to defence barracks, as BAM is doing with A.Hak and Heijmans with the Army Technology Centre, are hedging that risk. Those that depend on a single ministry’s budget line are not. The same tension between a visionary programme and an annual budget is visible in the Delta Works and Room for the River.

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