The American engineering group TYLin has located the headquarters of its division for Europe and Latin America in Barcelona: a company with offices in 5 countries that employs 500 people and has works underway in 25 countries.
Xavier Montobbio, president of TYLin Europe Latam, points out that the group is the sixth largest engineering company in the United States, and that it has built its presence in Europe through the purchase of GPO Group, a Barcelona engineering company specialized in rail transport, which in the In recent years it had grown with the purchase of the Madrid company Ideam, specialized in unique structures and viaducts, and Tunnel Consult, specialized in tunnels.
The group, explains Montobbio, is now merging its Spanish subsidiaries, in a process that is expected to end at the end of the year, and has already unified all the brands to boost its growth.
TYLin is part of DAR, one of the largest engineering groups in the world, with Lebanese capital, where it has specialized in the design of transportation infrastructure. The company has an annual turnover of 850 million dollars with a staff of 5,000 people.
Despite its strong presence in the United States and Asia, TYLin barely had a presence in Europe, where it plans to grow from the purchase of GPO, a company it entered in 2017 and which it controls 100% from 2021.
TYLin Europe Latam invoices 55 million euros annually and although its origin is the Spanish company, the national market represents a minority part of its business, which is based on its internationalization. “Investment in infrastructure in Spain collapsed after the 2008 crisis and has not recovered,” acknowledges Montobbio, who was the architect of GPO’s international expansion.
Furthermore, he assures, “in our country the public bidding for engineering projects has become almost an auction, in which practically only the price is valued, not the quality of the project, although the good design of a work can later produce million-dollar savings in the construction and maintenance of infrastructure.” Thus, Montobbio explains that engineering fees in Spain are usually around 2% of the cost of the work, while in the United States they are between 5% and 8%.
In Spain, TYLin’s most important projects are the construction management of lines 8 and 9 of the Barcelona metro and the undergrounding project for the Adif railway in Mollet del Vallès. Outside Spain, the works on lines 6 and 16 of the Sao Paulo metro and the updating of a 500 km stretch of railway track for the transport of goods on the Pacific coast of Mexico stand out.
