Bielefeld. As a construction and services company based in Bielefeld and active throughout Europe, Goldbeck today published its earnings figures for the 2023/24 financial year. Overall, Goldbeck looks back on the last financial year with satisfaction, given the continued economic and geopolitical tensions. From 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024, the company generated a total turnover of 6.4 billion euros (previous year: 6.7 billion euros). Difficult circumstances continue to pose challenges for the construction industry. “As yet, there is still no sign of calmer waters ahead for anyone in our industry,” says Managing Partner Jörg-Uwe Goldbeck in assessment of the current situation. “This makes us all the more grateful for a stable overall result in the past financial year.” His brother and fellow Managing Partner, Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck, continues: “The construction and real estate sector is late-cyclical. While other sectors have already come through the worst of it, 2025 and 2026 will be crucial for our industry.” The situation remains tense, and the construction industry is in an ongoing recession. “We know all about the challenges – and our own strengths. Our current order intake provides a solid starting point for the coming year,” Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck stresses.
Demand for economical building solutions high
During the reporting period, Goldbeck handed over a total of 510 turnkey properties to its customers across Europe – including 292 warehouses and factory buildings, 85 office buildings, 79 multi-storey car parks, ten school buildings, 15 sports halls and 172 residential units. The company refurbished 22 properties. “The demand for ultra-economical building solutions is high, especially in times like these,” says Jörg-Uwe Goldbeck. “We use our systematised and serial approach to cater to this need.” As a result, the company’s core business remains stable. “We are seeing much higher demand in the existing building refurbishment sector,” says Jörg-Uwe Goldbeck. “Inventory renovation is one of the major challenges facing the whole industry. Our extensive experience in the construction and operation of many different types of buildings allows us to bring our expertise to bear here. Whether we are tackling new builds or existing buildings, we always stick to the system.” Orders from public-sector clients are also increasing. “We guarantee adherence to deadlines and cost certainty – decisive factors for success,” adds Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck. Goldbeck manufactures essential construction components industrially at its own plants and assembles them precisely at the construction site. This provides economical solutions and ensures construction is completed quickly. While it is customary in the industry to start the building process at the construction site itself, Goldbeck takes a different approach, using a construction kit system to assemble precast elements on site.
Expansion of the decentralised network and investment in capacity
Among other locations, the company is now also active in Schwerin, Cardiff, London, Lucerne and Aarhus, thereby expanding its decentralised network to 118 locations. "We generate around 36 per cent of our total turnover outside Germany. Our international presence combined with local proximity makes us one of the leading construction companies in Europe,” says Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck. With a strong presence both at home and abroad, the company is able to compensate for fluctuations in local markets.
In June 2024, Goldbeck celebrated its tenth precast concrete plant in Kirchberg (Hunsrück) upon reaching the milestone of all its columns being erected. Since the summer, a new office building at the Bielefeld site has also provided space for around 450 employees. In Treuen (Saxony), Goldbeck has created Europe’s most technologically advanced sheet metal centre. At its opening ceremony in April, the DGNB (German Sustainable Building Council) presented Goldbeck with its platinum certification award. “Our new factory building in Treuen is a clear commitment to Germany as a production location. This is reflected in the cutting-edge technology we have installed at the site,” says Jörg-Uwe Goldbeck in summary. “What’s more, Kirchberg will be our most sustainable precast concrete plant yet.”
The economic response to the housing shortage
In the current financial year, Goldbeck has registered a significant increase in order intake in its residential business unit with around 1,000 residential units, while real order intake figures for the residential construction sector in general are below the previous year’s level. “For us, this shows that our approach of using precast elements to achieve serial effects, and thus provide the much-needed housing quickly and economically, is continuing to gain acceptance,” says Jörg-Uwe Goldbeck. Goldbeck is using this approach to plan and build an array of projects, including a current contract for 860 apartments in Berlin’s Neukölln district. On a site that was once home to a swimming pool in dire need of renovation, a total of approximately 39,000 square metres of living space will be created by 2026. This will also benefit social housing, as around 100 of the apartments included in the project will be social housing units. “In Germany, we can’t afford to start from scratch every time we want to build a new apartment. Our systematic approach to construction enables us to design and implement high-quality living space at high speeds – with serial production,” says Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck. “Contrary to the current mood in the construction industry, we see residential construction as a product of the future.”
Paradigm shift also in school construction
The number of pupils in schools throughout Germany continues to rise. Massive investments in school construction are needed to renovate existing buildings and create new learning environments. “We are demonstrating just how quickly school construction can be put into practice,” says Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck. “With our systematic approach, we create future-oriented and architecturally advanced learning environments on time and at low cost.” The necessary paradigm shift is already underway, and public-sector clients are increasingly recognising the benefits of working with a general contractor. In contrast to the complex individual trade award, choosing one contractor to handle the entire project means that all the planning and construction is carried out by the same company. “Goldbeck combines the areas of planning and construction, which are traditionally kept separate in public procurement processes,” Jörg-Uwe Goldbeck explains. “Not only do we build solutions on a turnkey basis – we also plan and coordinate all the different trades involved in the project.” This allows for more accurate calculation of dates and costs, and thus better adherence to deadlines. On average, it takes only 13.5 months to for a new school to be completed.
Major contract for training centres for the General Customs Directorate
In the current financial year, Germany’s Institute for Federal Real Estate (BImA) has commissioned Goldbeck with the design and construction of ten field training centres for the General Customs Directorate. Goldbeck has been contracted by the BImA to build ten new operational training centres for customs operations across Germany. Each site will cover an area of around 13,500 square metres and include a sports hall, a field training building and an indoor shooting range. “The logic is economic and efficient: plan once, build ten times. With our systematic construction method, we can quickly produce high-quality buildings for the Customs Office,” explains Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck.
Growth for the Service division – Focus on sustainability
The company's service division supervises or manages 2,102 properties. Goldbeck Property Services has a real estate portfolio comprising 420 properties. As of the reporting date, Goldbeck Parking Services manages approximately 200 car parks with over 118,500 spaces across Germany and Austria. Goldbeck Public Partner GmbH operates more than 52 buildings as part of public-private partnerships. Goldbeck Facility Services has a total of 1,430 properties under contract. Goldbeck Technical Solutions with its Refurbishment Services and Goldbeck Parking Services have implemented 79 existing building refurbishment projects. The Goldbeck Sustainability Consulting service unit is successfully establishing itself on the market by advising portfolio owners on the sustainable transformation of their real estate portfolios. Over the last financial year, the unit surveyed, reviewed and analysed 435 properties in their entirety for its customers. “Building operations are an important lever on the road to greater sustainability,” explains Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck. “We are improving the necessary sustainability know-how among staff in all our service units and networking our divisions with one another. This will help us ensure that we are giving our customers the best advice possible when it comes to the sustainability of their properties and securing their value.”
Long-term goal: nature-positive buildings in the 2030s
Goldbeck sees its own sustainability transformation as not only the answer to pressing challenges but also a prime example of a forward-looking business model. As part of its comprehensive sustainability strategy, Goldbeck is committed to achieving a wide range of goals at the company, product and project levels. For the third year in a row, it has voluntarily reported its progress in a sustainability report, alongside its business figures. For the first time, this year’s report includes highlights from subsidiaries GSE and DS Gruppen. In April 2024, Goldbeck joined the United Nations Global Compact. By signing this agreement, the company has committed to aligning its business activities with ten principles in the areas of human rights, labour standards, environmental protection, and the fight against corruption, and to actively supporting the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
How do Goldbeck’s operations interlink with and impact biodiversity along its value and supply chains? What opportunities and risks does this present? And how does the company deal with these factors? These are questions Goldbeck is addressing in an ongoing biodiversity study that forms the basis for a corporate mission statement on biodiversity. “By working with the scientific community, a clearly focused strategy and targeted measures, we hope to have a positive impact,” explains Jörg-Uwe Goldbeck. “This includes selecting suppliers carefully based on biodiversity criteria, promoting biodiversity at our company locations, and developing measures to increase biodiversity in customer projects.” Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck adds: “At the product and project levels, our moonshot is to construct nature-positive buildings in the 2030s and to establish buildings that not only significantly boost biodiversity but also act as CO2 sinks, as energy power plants and as material banks for the future.” The company’s mission: to develop systemic, scalable and cross-life-cycle solutions. “We firmly believe that only this will ensure they are marketable,” says Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck.
One important step towards achieving this vision is the company’s continuous investment in research and development, including in concrete. “At our Concrete Innovation Centre, which we launched last financial year, we will continue to explore decarbonisation options and make this indispensable material more environmentally friendly,” explains Jörg-Uwe Goldbeck. “With our Blue Concrete, we are already achieving CO2 savings of 35 percent compared to the average in our industry.”
In Goldbeck Blue Buildings, the company has developed a holistic sustainability concept for its customers: Buildings in the Goldbeck system that use preconfigured measures to meet targets in the areas of energy efficiency, resource efficiency, biodiversity, circularity, carbon footprint, convenience and health, as well as established sustainability standards such as the EU taxonomy, the CRREM decarbonisation pathway and the DGNB certification requirements. Goldbeck’s DGNB multiple gold certificates for warehouses, factory buildings, office buildings and business parks form one of the key components in the basis for reliable and economical certification. The multiple gold certificate awarded to Goldbeck’s multi-storey car park system in 2024 represented DGNB’s first ever pre-certification for a standard in multi-storey car park construction.
Prompting buildings with AI and creating a digital twin
As a driver of innovation with a pioneering spirit, Goldbeck is strategically advancing Artificial Intelligence (AI). Since 2023, the company has been an early adopter of the technology, creating its own AI team to ensure that AI is used to provide valuable assistance at every node of the Goldbeck business model. The company’s focus is on tackling the real-life opportunities and problems at hand, and not on AI as an end in itself. Goldbeck is already implementing both cross-sectional applications and specific specialist applications in areas where they can increase efficiency and improve quality. “We see AI as a tool and assistance system for the people at the heart of our work. Our vision is to one day use AI to prompt buildings,” stresses Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck. AI will have a key role to play as a technology in the future of the company.
Another core element of digital innovation is the digital twin – a model that represents the actual built condition of a building. With the handover of the first digital review document following the completion of a building, Goldbeck has reached an important milestone on the way to achieving this goal. The solution takes the form of an app – the Goldbeck Building Twin – that combines 3D models based on Building Information Modelling (BIM) with traditional revision documents on a single platform. BIM also serves as a digital basis for quantifying sustainability in planning, construction and operation. The interface with the Goldbeck material database contributes to this goal. The aim is to provide customers with a digital building resource pass.
More than 12,500 people work at Goldbeck
The company currently employs more than 12,500 people. With 1,993 people joining in the 2023/24 financial year, the growth in employees exceeded the previous year (1,582). With its company-wide talent management strategy, the family business continues to invest in fostering young talent and international talent development. In the last financial year, Goldbeck employed 357 apprentices, work-study students and trainees. “Even and especially in these volatile times, we can rely on our employees,” Jörg-Uwe Goldbeck is keen to stress. “Our actions are based on humanity, responsibility, trust, performance and pioneering spirit. Goldbeck employees in 20 countries across Europe ensure that we can offer tailor-made solutions in all markets.”