IN Brief:
- Group turnover fell 14% to £215m in 2025, while pre-tax profit eased from £12.2m to £10.5m.
- Cash increased by more than £10m to £80m, with the company maintaining its policy of carrying no borrowings.
- R G Carter expects revenue to recover in 2026 as delayed schemes move from the order book into construction.
R G Carter expects revenue to recover during 2026 after delayed project starts reduced turnover and profit last year, with the regional contractor entering the current period carrying £80m of cash, no borrowings, and a stronger forward order book.
Group turnover fell 14% to £215m in the year to 31 December 2025, compared with approximately £249m previously. Pre-tax profit reduced to £10.5m from £12.2m as a number of projects moved later than expected rather than progressing onto site on their original programmes.
The construction division generated £194m of turnover, down from £225m, while pre-tax profit held comparatively firm at £8.7m against £9.2m the previous year. Manufacturing revenue also reduced, from £43m to £36m, although pre-tax profit in that part of the group edged upwards to £1.6m.
The balance sheet moved in the opposite direction. Cash increased by more than £10m to around £80m and the privately owned group continued its policy of operating without borrowings. Employee numbers fell by around 6% to 712 during the year as workload shifted later and management adjusted capacity.
Chairman Robert Carter said: “Despite continued challenging broader economic conditions both the construction and manufacturing divisions have delivered a strong trading performance.”
The turnover movement shows how project timing passes quickly into contractor accounts. A scheme can remain secured within an order book while contributing relatively little revenue until planning conditions, design, finance, procurement, or client approvals are complete and physical work begins.
For a regional contractor carrying permanent staff and operational infrastructure, several delayed starts at once can leave overhead capacity ahead of live workload. Pre-construction teams, estimating, design management, offices, property, plant, and support functions still have to be funded while the projects intended to recover those costs remain in mobilisation or pre-start stages.
R G Carter’s cash position gives it more room to manage that timing gap. £80m of cash and no borrowings provide working-capital capacity for mobilisation, supply chain payments, and the uneven cash profile of major contracts without adding interest costs or short-term refinancing pressure.
The group says its forward order book for 2026 is significantly stronger and expects revenue to increase as postponed projects move onto site. The critical measure will be conversion: awarded schemes need to become live construction quickly enough for revenue growth to follow without forcing the company to rebuild labour and subcontractor capacity faster than the programme can sustain.
The contractor has also secured a position on the Department for Education’s construction framework as one of three new entrants. Framework membership does not guarantee individual contracts, but it gives the business access to a defined public-sector procurement route and the possibility of a more consistent education pipeline where subsequent projects are called off.
Repeated work in education can offer efficiencies in design management, occupied-site logistics, subcontractor procurement, sustainability requirements, and commissioning. Those benefits only materialise when projects arrive in a reasonably predictable sequence; a framework that produces bursts of work followed by gaps can recreate the same capacity problems as the wider market.
The construction business remained profitable during the softer year, which separates the result from the deeper losses being reported elsewhere in the contracting market. The issue is not whether R G Carter can generate margin on construction, but whether the timing and volume of work allow that margin to support the group’s fixed cost base consistently.
During 2025, the business also completed the transfer of its defined-benefit pension scheme to Aviva at a reported cost of £17m. Removing a long-term pension obligation can simplify the balance sheet, although the transaction itself requires substantial cash. The company still finished the year with liquidity materially higher than at the previous year end.
That combination leaves R G Carter entering 2026 in an unusual position: turnover and profit have both fallen, but the balance sheet has strengthened and management expects more work to reach site. The company does not need indiscriminate volume simply to keep debt under control, giving it greater scope to choose projects on margin, programme, and client risk.
The next accounts will show whether the delayed schemes converted at the rate expected. If they did, the stronger order book should feed through into turnover without requiring a change in the group’s conservative financing model. If start dates slip again, £80m of cash provides protection — but even a strong balance sheet cannot turn an unstarted project into revenue.
