Video: Airports

Graham Levinsohn, Group Strategy and Development Director, on G4S's global capabilities in the aviation sector

Transcript:

In terms of the G4S business model, we really started to recognise the aviation sector as a global sector having global challenges, global demands. We therefore brought in a global sector head to lead that.

Now we’ve got lots of experience across the world. We do something like 80 airports across many countries. We’ve services from baggage handling right the way through to ground handling so we’ve got lots of experience and really it’s about leveraging that experience and from all of those countries, bringing that together and applying our knowledge base going forward. Of course we’ll be a lot more active in terms of stakeholders, in terms of regulators, in terms of helping shape the industry on a going forward basis.

Well we still think New Markets is a tremendous growth driver so for example in India and China there’s going to be 300 new airports built over the next ten years. You’ve got huge development going on in the Middle East as they seek to build aviation hubs to rival Hong Kong and Singapore. Of course airlines will always continue to strive for efficiency. It’s a very difficult industry, difficult in terms of margins so they’re always going to want to drive efficiency and that equally applies to security.

I think one of the challenges that the aviation industry has is really to start re-looking at the whole security challenge. Currently it really responds to the latest security incident and they work out how they’re going to stop that security incident and of course that’s important but you really have got to step back and say we’ve had the, these security protocols build up over many years. Let’s step back, let’s take a complete risk assessment of that site, let’s put together a full site security plan and let’s really look at the complete security plan going forward.

I think in terms of the G4S capability, we operate in over 80 countries, we’ve got many areas of expertise across the group. The good thing is we’ve now brought that all together in one recent contract win at Baghdad Airport where really we’re supplying a complete solution in a very very difficult environment, and I think that gives us a great base on which to build going forward.

We see tremendous opportunities. There is large-scale investment going into the Middle East, there’s large-scale investment going into India and China as just some examples so certainly there’s definitely opportunities out there that actually match our global footprint very well, and of course there will be situations in terms of developed markets where we’ll see contracts come out to tender but there’s a very big build programme going on in the aviation sector to meet global demand and certainly we see tremendous opportunities over the next one to three years.