Now let's spend a few minutes talking about the types of construction projects. So when people talk about the construction industry, what are they talking about? So, we can put them in a few different buckets. For the purposes of discussion, let's put them in these four buckets. Industrial, heavy, residential and building construction. And let's start with the residential, because that makes up the largest portion of revenue across the construction industry. So residential construction's probably what most people are familiar with. It's the building of individual homes, multi-family homes, condominiums, or high-rise apartments. That makes up nearly 40% of the industry. Then building construction, so if you think of other buildings. Other types of structures that need to be built to support global infrastructure. Things like schools, universities, manufacturing plants, recreation centers. All of those types are other elements of building construction. And you may also hear the term sometimes vertical construction or horizontal construction. And the residential construction and the building construction are vertical construction. Why do we call it that? Well, if you think about how the projects go and the structures that are built, they're built vertically out of the ground. That's the reason we call it vertical construction. Contrasting that is horizontal construction. So looking in the category of heavy engineering construction. Things like tunnels, bridges, highways, transit systems, those things are built horizontally along the ground, referred to as horizontal construction. The reason they're segregated sometimes is the tools, the techniques, the knowledge that are required to build in a vertical environment or a horizontal environment can be a little bit different. That category of heavy engineering construction is referred to as heavy because of the equipment that's required to do this type of work. As we had just talked about, in the case of the Hoover Dam and the incredible effort it takes to carry out a project like that, the size of the equipment. So we're thinking about very heavy equipment. Earth moving equipment, graters, excavators, massive cranes. This is the equipment required to do this kind of work and hence referred to as heavy engineering construction. It includes those major elements of water treatment plants. Ports, airports, seaports, or harbors, bridges, tunnels, all of those fall into that category. That makes up approximately 30% of the industry. And last but not least, making up about 13% of the industry is industrial construction. So things like refinery steel mills, power plants, synthetic fuel plants. And what makes these a little bit different on the industrial side? If you wanna contrast social infrastructure versus economic infrastructure, economic infrastructure is those things that support and allow and provide the ability to drive economics. That drives our commerce. Industrial construction focuses on those facilities, and typically has elements of them associated with high pressures, high temperatures, and the moving of materials through the facilities. Now, let's spend a few minutes talking about Industry characteristics. So when we talk about this industry, what's unique about it, what's special? And when we think about how the world is changing today, what makes that unique and special at this point in time? The World Economic Forum, along with the Boston Consulting Group, put a report out in May of 2016, which provided some interesting insight into the industry. One of them, the size of the industry, $10 trillion, employing 100 million people globally. So you get an appreciation for the size of this industry. The importance. And the importance goes beyond the industry itself and the people it employes. But the importance is how it helps drive economies around the world and the critical service that it provides the people of the world. Another statistic coming out of this and anybody that works in the industry knows and appreciates how fragmented it is. One of the most fragmented industries there are has over, if you look at an example too, which they pointed out in the US, the US has 700,000 engineering and construction companies with 80% having ten or few workers. So if you think about how work gets done and how work is divided up across the industry and the fact that each one could have a slightly different approach on how they would approach a project, you get an appreciation of how fragmented it is and some of the challenges that that can present to the industry and those that it supports. Something else that's somewhat unique to the industry is the fact that it's project based. So we talked about some of the major projects in the introduction. But if you think about the fact that every project is unique in it's own way. So think about where the project is, who it's being built for. If you think about the environmental conditions, the demand, whose doing the work, what the expectations are, what the specifications are. Every project is somewhat unique. So unlike a manufacturing process where you're able to set the condition, set the environment, and get a repeatable process. You're not able to do this to the same degree in this industry, which makes it much more challenging when we think about delivering projects. Another challenge, and something unique to the industry is that projects are largely created on site. So when we think about structures. When we think about buildings and bridges and airports, you don't create them somewhere else and bring them and set them down. It has to be built on site. Which means you have to bring all of the expertise and all of the equipment to that site. Again, unlike manufacturing where you have the ability to have it under controlled and repeatable conditions. This is new every time, which makes it much more challenging. And the industry is making some really big strides with respect to prefabrication or actually moving more of a factory type setting in building structures, but there's a very long way to go. And again, it's another one of those significant challenges. Another industry characteristic is multiple stakeholders with changing priorities. So every project has a unique set of stakeholders from the public that may be impacted by it to those that are going to use it. So in the case of a transit system. The riders, those that are gonna be impacted by the right of way, where that transit system is going to be placed. Those that are gonna help build and construct it. The governments that are helping fund it. All of those have their own set of priorities, in many cases different priorities, and those priorities are changing over time. So you have kind of a moving target when we talk about engineering and construction projects. And some of the challenges that goes with delivering excellence in that type of environment. Another characteristic of the industry is low profitability. And this has been consistent for many, many years and this is both on the engineering and construction side. But typical profitability on projects is less than 5%. So when you think about the margin for error and the ability to have to go back and do rework, do parts of a project again, or unsuccessful projects, and not having a large margin for error. It also makes it a very tough industry to be successful. And we see over time, it's part of the reason for the fragmented nature of the business. It also impacts the ability then, to invest back into the industry. I would contrast this as well with typical profitability in the S&P 500 companies, which is typically over 15% on an annual basis. And related to that, research and development has not been a priority for the industry either. And part of that is because of the availability of funding in the industry to drive into research and development and part of it is the nature of the industry. The industry was built on the notion of always looking after the public interest and to design and build in a very conservative way, which drives thinking around using techniques and methodologies that have been tried and true, tested out, and been used many times before. And that drives a certain mentality on how projects are designed and constructed. Those thought processes have led us to the last industry characteristic. Which is the industry is conservative by nature. So if you think about how decisioning is done, how innovation can find its way into the industry, it's tough. Because the industry has been and continues to be very conservative by nature.
