On this day: The fall of Carillion |
On this day 2018 Carillion, the construction giant, ran out of road
Tarmac. It is easy to forget that the word we unthinkingly use for the everyday road material began life as a trademark, a mixture of coal tar and macadam aggregate which in 1903 launched a company. By the 1990s, Tarmac Group was a construction giant with an annual turnover of £3bn. In the preceding decades, the Wolverhampton-based firm had bought up house-building companies, and that sector came to account for more than half its profits.
Then the worldwide recession of late 1990 hit. The spike in oil prices after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, restrictive monetary policy and a sharp fall in business and consumer confidence led to economic contraction. A decline in house-building and overinvestment in land pummelled Tarmac, its chairman and chief executive, Sir Eric Pountain, was ousted and the group began to restructure and downsize.
In July 1999 Tarmac Group was broken up: the heavy building materials concern retained the Tarmac name, while Tarmac Construction and Tarmac Professional Services were brought together and relaunched as Carillion.
There was something symbolic about the transition from the genericised brand name “Tarmac” to “Carillion”, a name devised by image consultants Enterprise IG to give the new company a fresh and separate identity. It was also faintly hollow and elusive, a mild corruption of “carillon”, a peal of bells.
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