Balfour Beatty scraps final dividend

Balfour Beatty scrapped its final dividend after the Covid-19 lockdown had a material impact on the group's financial performance across its business.

The infrastructure group said it cancelled the dividend "in line with the current environment" but that it would buy £112m of preference shares due on 1 July. Balfour Beatty had previously said it was keeping the dividend under review.

The FTSE 250 company said its order book at the end of April was £17.4bn, up more than 20% from a year earlier and boosted by more than £3bn of HS2 contracts.

Balfour Beatty said it had a strong first quarter in the three months to the end of March but after that business deteriorated significantly. In May, 83% of its construction sites were open but almost a fifth of those suffered from lack of employees, subcontractors or materials.

After postponing its annual meeting early in the Covid-19 crisis, Balfour Beatty said a skeleton meeting would take place on 25 June at its offices in Slough.

"The board will continue to review the group's capital structure and the potential for further distributions to shareholders, as and when the impacts of Covid-19 on the group are clearer," Balfour Beatty said.