New Building, Infrastructure & Construction

Quick Facts on the Ecosystem

CVA capitalizes on 35 years of extensive work and knowledge in the different sectors of building materials and components. 10 years ago, we already incorporated the need to think about business ecosystems beyond industries such as construction.

CVA’s New Building, Infrastructure & Construction platform was created to address the different challenges ahead by bringing coherence - through understanding the end-use of what is built across living, working and moving systems (customer-centric ecosystem) – and consistency – via incorporating the full cycle of the value chain from affordable & sustainable construction to smart & efficient operation management (OM) including support services.

Our past projects have covered most geographies especially Europe and Middle-East Africa (EMEA), Asia-Pacific (APAC) and North America (NA) working with local and global leading players of different origins (public, family-owned, PE-funded, state-owned, join-venture etc.).

Macro trends and business implications on the ecosystem:

Historically driven by a voice of regulations (and not a voice of customers), the construction of Building & Infrastructure will change deeply in the long run by looking at the end-use expectations of their systems: affordable wellbeing, precision turnkey, carbon neutrality, total cost of ownership, inter-connected modularity, risk prevention, experience-based interaction.

The building & infrastructure industry is in the early stage of massive transformation that may take a few decades to fully play out. For the construction alone, six key sector dynamics have been identified with various levels of intensities across the value chain.

  1. Changing basis of competition - De-commoditization, servitization, internationalization (new entrants) and consolidation (up to backward/forward integration to some extent).

  2. Ecosystem & value shifts – Differentiated market growth with alliances in emerging ecosystems around digitalization, circular transition and solutions (client, data, value split).

  3. Resource & margin squeeze – Rising costs of energy/materials with PPI to monitor linked to sustainability /resource scarcity plus supply chain disruptions adding delivery delays.

  4. Climate change imperative – Net-zero ambition pressured by aware consumers and regulations, carbon price modifying economic trade-offs in terms of production or use.

  5. Tech & digital equity story - Players started to embrace digital and technologies such as IoT and AI but most of them are slow to scale, leaving great sources of savings on the table.

  6. Future of work - Growing shortage of skilled workforce in the industry reinforced by aging populations in some regions, which asks for rethinking talent & skill management.

The economic environment is a catalyst for players to manage their portfolio actively (value chain transparency, merger & acquisition, carve-out, etc.), rethink value propositions (green offerings & value selling, product value management/redesign-to-cost, etc.), transform targeted processes (customer experience, market analytics, pricing, low carbon sourcing, etc.) without forgetting to streamline operations including G&A leveraging digitalization at maximum.

Platform vision & service offering:

CVA is a global strategy boutique of European-origin with proprietary methodologies from strategy to execution to deliver sustainable and tangible results, and with an ‘As-One’ mindset to facilitate internal buy-in and handover.

Our partners are involved systematically and continuously in the delivery of projects, for which we like to propose flexible team organizations and travels.

Depending on your needs, CVA New Building, Infrastructure & Construction platform can address five main issues: strategy & uncertainty, topline & effectiveness, operations & efficiency, corporate finance & alliance, transformation & execution.

Case Study

We have assisted blue chips on the following topics at corporate and country levels, while making sure all those engaged initiatives are deployed in a coherent and efficient way.

  1. Rethink more fundamentally the set-up in the value chain and manage actively the portfolio.

  2. Design new business models and develop strategic alliances up to acquisitions.

  3. Realize full client/market potentials (incl. pricing) through deeper application understanding.

  4. Configure new service & data-based offerings considering willingness-to-pay from the start.

  5. Drive front-end innovation through sustainability-led market opportunity assessment.

  6. Incorporate decarbonation in industrial assets leveraging disruptive 360° capex optimization.

  7. Reach the next level of digital customer experience and seamless operations (end-to-end).

  8. Secure cost competitiveness via exhaustive, systematic and structured investigation of levers.

  9. Recreate compelling corporate story (vision/“polar star”) for all stakeholders.

Platforms