Limak signs its contract with FC Barcelona on February 1, 2023
Featured image credit: Limak
Turkish company Limak Construction has chosen Barcelona to act as a hub for its European and Latin American projects, on the back of its high-profile contract win to conduct the redevelopment of Spotify Camp Nou.
Spanish LaLiga football club FC Barcelona in January appointed Limak to carry out the €960m (£850.6m/$1.02bn) redevelopment of its stadium, with work scheduled to begin in June following the conclusion of the 2022-23 season.
Limak was a surprise choice as it only has experience of building one football stadium, the 25,500-capacity Mersin Arena in Turkey. The company specialises in building infrastructure such as airports, factories and hotels.
Limak said it already has 40 employees working in Barcelona, but plans to expand this workforce to 200 people by 2026. It also intends to subcontract work for the Camp Nou project to other international firms, yesterday naming Spanish company Ghesa and Australian firm Robert Bird Group as engineering partners.
Haldun Firat Köktürk, director general of Limak Construction, said, according to Spanish newspaper El Confidencial: “We have decided to have our European and Latin American hub in Barcelona, a capital open to the world and a cosmopolitan city with an entrepreneurial ecosystem that attracts the most dynamic international companies every year.
“Barcelona also has a large youth academy of international talent, especially in engineering, with very powerful universities, such as the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), in addition to promoting entrepreneurship and innovation with well-known fairs and events.”
Barcelona last month retained the services of Japanese architectural and engineering firm Nikken Sekkei for the Camp Nou project. Nikken Sekkei will serve as a ‘design guardian’ for the revamped stadium. The company, in conjunction with Pascual y Ausió Arquitectes, were the winners of the competition to design the new Camp Nou in 2016.
In September, Barcelona appointed the joint venture of Ingeniería Arquitectura Torrella and Ingenieros JG to direct the next construction phase for the project. The news came after it had previously been reported that locally-based Torrella had been awarded the contract ahead of Nikken Sekkei.
Under the new deal, Nikken Sekkei will work with Barcelona to guarantee the continuity of the initial concept and work towards ways of integrating new proposals into the project. It will provide technical assistance to Limak.
The revamp of the Camp Nou forms part of Barcelona’s wider Espai Barça project, which also includes the delivery of a new Palau Blaugrana arena and the wide-ranging Campus Barça development. The capacity of the Camp Nou will increase from 98,000 to 105,000 as part of the revamp.
Barcelona earlier unveiled plans to pay for the Espai Barça project through a €1.5bn bond issue that runs until the second half of the century. President Joan Laporta confirmed that the bonds have been certified by Morningstar Sustainalytics and will be issued on the US market in the Green Bond category.
Barcelona will spend the 2023-24 season at the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys while the Camp Nou undergoes renovation.
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