VW Wachal earned over half a billion crowns last year. However, there is a lack of employees and contracts from the private sector
Construction company VW Wachal, one of the largest family companies according to the Forbes ranking, from Kroměříž, earned 626.7 million crowns from the sale of products, services and goods last year. It was 149.4 million crowns more year-on-year.
The company’s profit for the year 2021 amounted to approximately 8.4 million crowns after taxation, a year earlier it reached almost 15.8 million crowns. This follows from the company’s annual reports stored in the Collection of Documents.
According to the chairman of the board of directors, William Wachal, the construction market also struggled with the effects of the covid-19 pandemic last year.
“These were mainly manifested in problems with supply chains, which resulted in a shortage of building materials. This, of course, led to a sharp increase in the prices of these materials. The pandemic continued to deepen the fall in investment in the private sector, especially in the area of industrial halls,” said Wachal.
The increase in prices caused him greater problems in the public sector, where the preparation and competition for contracts is longer.
“Despite the mentioned problems and challenges, our company managed to succeed again in a number of tenders and we signed a number of new projects,” said Wachal.
Among the thirteen orders that the company concluded are, for example, an apartment building for the city of Kroměříž, an emergency pavilion at the Děčín hospital, the reconstruction of the Spirála theater at the exhibition center in Prague, or a multi-purpose building for the Ministry of the Interior.
“Among the contracts obtained, we lack the private sector, which we would like more of in the long term. However, now the situation is even more complicated,” said the chairman of the board of directors.
Last year’s sales of the company were most significantly dominated by the construction of the central fire station in Nové Jičín, the completion of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, the revitalization of the city center of Orlová – Lutyně in the Karvinsk region, the construction of the menagerie of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the polyclinic in Lanškron in Orlickoústek. For this year, the company aimed to stabilize annual sales at the level of at least one billion crowns.
The company employed an average of 90 people last year, ten fewer than the year before. It released almost 44 million crowns for their wages.
“A very complex situation remains in the field of recruiting qualified workers in both blue-collar and technical professions. We are responding to it with different methods, we are trying new recruitment campaigns,” Wachal said.
The company VW Wachal has been registered in the commercial register since 1999. It focuses on all types of land construction.
In the past, for example, it was suitable for the reconstruction of operating theaters, facilities and laboratories of the Prague Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, the construction of a concert hall for the Prague Conservatory or the reconstruction of the headquarters of the University of Defense in Brno. The company also builds and reconstructs abroad.