Atkins awarded £75m Riyadh Metro contract

Atkins awarded £75m Riyadh Metro contract

WS Atkins plc ("Atkins") has been awarded a £75m contract as lead designer for three of the six lines of Saudi Arabia's transformational new Riyadh Metro, the largest public transportation project in the world.

Atkins will lead a design joint venture with Spanish consultancy Typsa for the FAST consortium (comprising FCC, Samsung, Alstom, Strukton and Freyssinet), which is responsible for metro lines 4, 5 and 6, representing just over a third of the total track.

FAST's design and build package, awarded by the Arriyadh Development Authority, includes 25 stations, two depots and seven park and ride car parks, with a total capital cost of approximately £5bn. Atkins will draw on a multidisciplinary team of around 200 specialist staff from its offices in Riyadh, the UAE, Bangalore, Hong Kong and the UK.

Prof Dr Uwe Krueger, chief executive officer, said: "Riyadh Metro is a landmark project which will raise standards of living and support long term sustainable development throughout the city, acting as a catalyst for further investment in all aspects of the public realm and built environment.

"We are one of the few organisations in the world with the breadth and depth of technical expertise and regional market experience to deliver a project of such scale and complexity. Our track record on other major metro programmes in the region, as well as our work on projects such as King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah and the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, was a key factor in our appointment."

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Atkins (www.atkinsglobal.com) is one of the world's leading design, engineering and project management consultancies*, employing some 18,000 people across the UK, North America, Middle East, Asia Pacific and Europe. Over 75 years, from post-war regeneration and the advent of nuclear engineering to high speed rail and the integrated sustainable cities of the future, our people's breadth and depth of expertise and drive to ask why has allowed us to plan, design and enable some of the world's most complex projects.

*14th largest global design firm (Engineering News-Record 2013) and the third largest multidisciplinary consultancy in Europe (Svensk Teknik och Design 2012).