What’s the Reality about Firm Size in the A/E/C Industry?
Presented by: Engineering News-Record
With the recent news of AECOM’s acquisition of URS, followed by their subsequent purchase of Hunt Construction, it seems like the big just keep getting bigger. If AECOM was a mega-firm at 50,000 employees, what is it at 95,000? Since a gigabyte is larger than a megabyte, it stands to reason that AECOM is the industry’s only giga-firm! Or have they made the leap to tera-firm size? But what’s the reality about firm size in the A/E/C industry? Is there a such thing as a “normal” sized firm? Well, our friends at the U.S. Census Bureau have something to say about that. Of course, their data is usually lagging a few years behind by the time it is published, but there’s still some useful information to be found in the 2011 Statistics of U.S. Businesses, the most current data available. I looked at firm size and employment for five categories: (1) Non-Residential Construction (2) Heavy and Civil Engineering Construction (3) Specialty Trade Construction (4) Architecture (5) Engineering The first thing that really jumps out is that the vast majority of firms in the A/E/C industry are small, regardless of category. Between 83% and 94% of firms in each category employ less than 20 people. The second thing that leaps off the data tables is that the absolutely largest firms in each category, those with 500 or more employees, represent no more than 1.15% of all firms – yet they employ anywhere from 11% to 47% of the representative workforce. Let’s break it down by type of firm.