The business logic of Chinese construction companies investing in the UK infrastructure sector

Construction is increasingly a global market underpinned by international investment. An important convergence of the UK and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) infrastructure policy agendas has led to significant investment from Chinese construction firms in the UK infrastructure sector. On the demand side, the UK Government’s National Infrastructure Plan sets out a wide range of investment priorities. The PRC Government’s One Belt, One Road strategy, on the supply side, has prioritized outward foreign investment into Eurasia. The scale and form of the investment into the UK is difficult to discern because, at present, the available data is often in high-level aggregated form and resides in separate, sometimes partial and incomplete, PRC and UK official datasets. A more nuanced understanding of Chinese construction firms' investment is needed by policy makers and multi-national construction firms to guide and optimize that investment. Results are presented as a synthesis of relevant official data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics and the PRC’s National Bureau of Statistics to avoid partial perspectives and to build a fuller picture. The time span of the data is from 2009 to 2015. The analysis shows that underlying the aggregated growth of Chinese construction firm investment in the UK infrastructure sector, there are distinct patterns and trends of investment in sub-sectors.