Broadway Malyan to announce loss for year

Broadway Malyan has admitted it will make a loss this year and be forced to close its Edinburgh office because of the recession.

This week director Gary Whittle said the firm would be in the red by the time its 2010 financial year finished at the end of the month.

And he revealed that the firm, which employs close to 500 people, would close its 14-strong Edinburgh branch this summer with the loss of some jobs.

The practice is one of the country’s biggest but has been forced to cut hundreds of posts and close offices in the past couple of years, slipping from 27 in BD’s World Architecture 100 last year to 57 in 2010.

“We have to adjust to be better placed where the opportunities are”

Gary Whittle

Whittle said that trading in the first six months of the year — the period between last May and October — had been “very difficult”, with Broadway Malyan also hit by a series of restructuring costs following redundancies.

“The last five or six months have been more stable,” he added, “but there will be a reduction in turnover and there will be a loss this year.”

In its last set of published accounts for the year to April 2009, pre-tax profits crashed 83% to £364,000 on turnover of £44 million.

The head of the Edinburgh studio, and main board director, Martin Bates, will relocate down to its office in London with the company hoping to redeploy most of the other staff elsewhere in the business.

Whittle blamed the closure on the state of the UK market, which he said was only just starting to pick up.

“We’re seeing a strengthening of inquiries at our offices in London and Weybridge but we see a fairly flat position in the UK. Hopefully we’ve bounced off the bottom.”

The firm is now looking overseas to boost its business and Whittle said it was mulling over a move to open up an office in Brazil following a recent win for a 600 room hotel in São Paulo.

“We are now a global business and we have to adjust the business to be better placed where the opportunities are.”