Alpine Bau GmbH, FCC's subsidiary for the central and eastern European markets, has secured the contract to build the S5 expressway in Poland for 948.23 million zloty, which is equivalent to 245 million euro at the current rate of exchange.

The Salzburg-based construction firm tendered its bid in a consortium with other companies. The Austrian subsidiary of the Citizen Service Group will be the firm in charge of leading the consortium. The client is GDDKiA, the Polish Federal Road Administration, whose seat is in Warsaw.

The project consists in building a dual carriageway joining the cities of Poznan (host to the opening game of next year's UEFA European Football Championship) and Wroclaw, and it includes ring roads around the cities of Bojanowo and Rawicz.

The 29-kilometre section will be twinned to include four lanes. A nine-kilometre-long district road will also be built, perpendicular to the dual carriageway. At present Alpine employs over 3,000 people in Poland.

And so the Austrian subsidiary of the FCC Group continues with its streak of successes this year in tenders in Poland. In addition to transport infrastructure projects, the company has three stadiums under construction for the UEFA Euro 2012 competition. Another prestigious contract it gained in 2010 is for the construction of the new Chemistry Department at Gdansk University. In addition, the work to refurbish the People's Hall (Hala Ludowa) in Wroclaw has won a prize for the Best Construction Project in 2009 in the refurbishment category.

Apart from its work in Poland, Alpine took home in April last the contract to build the central bus station in Hatvan, Hungary. This new station will become one of the country's most modern transport facilities.

Railway infrastructure

Another of the fortes of the Austrian subsidiary of the Group controlled by Esther Koplowitz is major projects and tunnel construction.

Early this year Alpine won the tender to build a railway tunnel in the German city of Karlsruhe. A 588-million-euro project, 310 million of which will go to the FCC subsidiary.

This project will set a technical and logistic landmark, because it involves not only the construction of the tunnel's own structure, but also about 35 kilometres of supply pipes that have to be refurbished without disturbing vehicular surface traffic. The project is scheduled to be concluded in 2016.

In addition, FCC's subsidiary in Austria is building another two railway tunnels in Germany for German railway operator Bahn AG, for nearly 122 million euro. These are Baumleite Tunnel and Kaiser Wilhelm Tunnel.

Alpine, the second-biggest construction group in Austria, posted 3,400 million euro in construction turnover in 2009 and has 15,234 employees.