On 23 March 2023, Abyss Managing Director, Richard Nelson, had the pleasure to chair the IoD Property and Built Environment Group’s hybrid seminar looking at smart buildings, digital twins and the Metaverse.

Richard Nelson, Founder and Managing Director of Abyss and Chair of the Institute of Directors Property and Built Environment Group, had the pleasure of being interviewed for this article, which originally appeared in the January 2022 issue of ‘All Things Business London’.

Few issues are as perennial as the push and pull between globalization and protectionism. Should procurement be subject to “Buy American” restrictions, or can the best prices and highest quality be achieved through international sourcing, especially for specialized services and products?

Many A/E/C (architecture, engineering and construction) businesses—along with their large corporate and manufacturing clients—have been expanding globally for the last five or six decades. But in the last decade, the global financial crisis (GFC), trade wars, geopolitics, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic, have seriously damaged the open trade system that has powered the globalised economy since World War II.

Due to the global pandemic, those of us with business development and sales responsibilities in the design and construction industry are facing a number of new challenges, not least of which is that many clients have simply put the brakes on new spending.

We spend a lot of time researching and analysing global construction markets to understand where the opportunities are for our clients. Here we've selected a few to highlight from the dozens that we have researched that have captured our interest for the start of the new (hopefully) "roaring 20's".

Once again, I am contemplating the question “When is the best time to expand internationally?” as the UK hurtles toward the abyss of an existence outside the European Union, having been a member for over four decades.

One thing I love about visiting emerging markets (EMs) is the incredible enthusiasm people have in these countries for thinking big and getting things done. Perhaps it is because EMs are coming from a less well-developed base, and they are playing catch up with Europe, North America and Japan, but there is also a strong spirit of competition and entrepreneurialism operating in EMs.

Have you set realistic targets for this year, and does international work factor into your plans? It seemed that the world’s leading economies were into a next stage of growth in 2014 after spending the previous six years in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The evidence so far shows that it is not all smooth sailing though.

Now that many of the world’s economies are growing again following the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, many firms in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry are considering—or reconsidering—whether the time is right to expand internationally.