The 2017 financial year was a year of continued transition for the company. With renewed leadership, we have strengthened and diversified our business to position GHD for the future. Pleasingly, we saw revenue for the year grow to AUD1.7 billion (USD1.3 billion), an increase of two percent on the previous year.

Clients engage us to provide sustainable solutions to their most complex challenges, created by increasing demands for water, energy and urbanisation. Our approach is underpinned by an unwavering focus on client service, technical excellence and connected thinking.

Ownership matters

Continued growth and evolution, as we near 90 years of business, is testament to our purpose, people and values. The dynamic connection between culture and employee ownership increasingly differentiates GHD from its competitors.

Our purpose is to create lasting benefits for our clients and the communities in which they operate. Put simply, we succeed because we care about our clients, our work, our communities and our company.

More than 25 percent of the 9000 people we employ are the owners of GHD. They are committed financially and personally to fostering a high-performance culture, client-first outcomes and leading-edge services.

Our values of Safety, Teamwork, Respect and Integrity drive our decision making and are reflected in how we behave collectively and individually.

Culture of safety

Safety improvement remains a core and constant focus across our network of 200+ offices. During the year, we implemented our SMART Behaviours program through our global Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) framework and developed our mobile HSE smartphone app. Our focus on meaningful positive interactions continues to be a key part of improving and embedding our safety culture.

Unfortunately, this year saw an increase in our Total Recordable Incident Rate per 1 million hours worked, which rose from 0.91 in FY16 to 1.13 in FY17 – a reminder that, despite our excellent track record and standing, we all need to be constantly vigilant and lead by personal example.

Reimagining Service Delivery

Our vision is to be an industry leader in client service. As technology revolutionises the professional services landscape, delivering on this vision will present new opportunities as we respond to the evolving needs of our clients.

This year, we are focused on two new high-growth areas: GHD Advisory and GHD Digital.

GHD Advisory launched in 2016 and has significantly its market position.

Partnering with our clients in all key sectors, we have identified opportunities to improve the productivity of key organisational assets including people and information systems.

Launched this year, GHD Digital integrates capabilities that are already established within our business and applies them to the technology-driven challenges that are confronting our clients. Our understanding of location intelligence, digital modelling, virtual and augmented reality, innovation, and data analytics enables us to offer new solutions and insights.

GHD Advisory and GHD Digital are emerging as significant contributors to our business and we look forward to building awareness of our capabilities in these areas.

Tomorrow’s leaders

A total of 314 graduates began their careers with GHD over the year. Women made up 38 percent of our graduate intake, contributing to the broader diversity of our company. An Employer of Choice citation from the Workplace Gender Equality agency in Australia recognised our ongoing efforts to build an inclusive business.

We also introduced a talent exchange program to enable the movement of our people across the globe at different stages of their careers to share knowledge and develop new skills and experience.

We bring our professionals together to connect and exchange ideas with clients in four global technical conferences.

Operational Highlights

North America

• Further expansion of our transportation capability with the acquisition of Omni- Means in California, USA
• Focus on regional growth in water and environment sectors
• Ongoing development of current and future leaders with Harvard Business School

Australia

• Increasing revenues in the Defence sector
• Growing share of transportation market, including roles in major infrastructure projects across Australia
• Expansion of our digital business with the acquisition of virtual reality company VR Space

Asia Pacific

• Opening of new offices in Cebu (Philippines), Suva (Fiji), Puerto Montt (Chile) and Dunedin and Tauranga (New Zealand)
• Success in securing long-term revenues with regional road network operations contracts in New Zealand
• Expansion in the property and buildings market with the acquisition of Creative Spaces in New Zealand

Europe/Middle East

• Opening of a new office in Newcastle, UK
• Continuing integration of our UK business into our new global systems
• Successful delivery of major industrial and aviation projects in the Middle East

Renewing our leadership

This year we saw the retirement of Russell Board after nearly 40 years at the company, six of these as Chairman. Russell led the company during its significant international expansion and has left it in excellent shape for the next generation. Rob Knott is greatly honoured to succeed Russell as we enter the next chapter of the company’s transformation and growth.

We made three new director appointments in 2017, welcoming Denise Anderson, Iver Skavdal and Sheryl Cornelius, enhancing our Board’s diversity of thought, background and experience. Their variety of perspectives and breadth of thinking will inform our long-term global outlook. With four women now making up 50% of our Board, we are proud of our leadership in diversity.

During the year, we began to consistently recognise our leaders around the world who are material owners of the company as Principals and Associates. This approach embeds accountability for owners of our business, creates clarity around ownership paths for our people and highlights our employee-owned status as a point of differentiation.

One global community

The most important measure of our success is the enduring impact we have on the communities we are a part of. This year, we continued our record of partnering with non-profit organisations and applying our skills to humanitarian and disaster-relief projects.

These initiatives demonstrate our people’s compassion, motivation and commitment to applying their expertise to help those in need.

Financial performance and strategy

As we look to celebrate our 90 year milestone in 2018, our strategy of empowered people and global connectivity has delivered long-term, sustainable benefits for all our stakeholders: clients, communities and our employees.

Global growth is now stronger than it has been in recent memory and we have a strong pipeline of work-in-hand and known opportunities. Our balance sheet is strong and we are on track to achieve our ‘Strategy to 2020’ target of AUD2 billion in revenue.

Outlook

Our aspiration is to be one of the top five employee-owned companies in the engineering, architecture and environmental consulting field.

Our capacity and reach are significant, with exciting potential for even further growth as we build awareness of our global brand, unlock emerging sectors and regions, and evolve our service offering to reflect the changing needs of our clients and the communities in which we operate.