Keller Group PLC (LSE:KLR) announced a 5% dividend hike as it won a major order with the government of Saudi Arabia and said it is performing as expected despite "material shortages and residual unrecovered inflation".
The ground engineering company has won a contract as one of a group of geotechnical specialists to begin work on the Neom Giga project in northwestern Saudi Arabia.
Keller is in the process of mobilising for the first works order – expected to be around £50mln and last 12 months – after signing an umbrella agreement for the 170-km mega-city.
Additional work orders are expected later this year on subsequent modules.
The company said it will increase its interim dividend to 13.2p, compared to 12.6p a year ago.
The company expects 2022 "to be a year of growth, with full year performance to have the customary second half weighting," and expects its order book to reach £1.5bn at the half-year stage.
As well as Neom, the company said it has been awarded a number of contracts in the energy and infrastructure sectors.
The political shift away from Russian hydrocarbons and the global surge of liquefied natural gas (LNG) activity were said to have helped its Recon acquisition, which is focused on US Gulf Coast LNG projects and continues to "perform very well", ahead of expectations and providing optimism about bagging new LNG contracts and the restart of suspended projects
Shares of the company were trading 3% higher at 721.03 in London in early trades.