What happened

Severfield, Britain's largest structural steelwork contractor, reported a £40m pre-tax loss for the year to March 2026, after new chief executive Paul McNerney booked £50m of exceptional charges to clear the way for a turnaround. That included £22m of impairment charges and £13m linked to closing the group's Modular Solutions arm.

McNerney, who took over as chief executive in autumn 2025 and brought in a former ISG finance chief in February to help steer the recovery, has now made two further senior appointments. Vasily Lovkovskiy, a former colleague from Laing O'Rourke, joins as head of transformation, while Jarrod Hulme returns as operations director, based at the group's Lostock steelworks in Bolton.

McNerney has said FY27 will remain a transition year as lower-margin legacy contracts work through the business, with growth in profit and falling leverage expected to follow in the year to March 2028.

Why it matters

Severfield fabricates the steel frames for a large share of the UK's warehouses, data centres, energy infrastructure and complex commercial buildings, so its strategy shift is a reasonable proxy for where the highest-value structural steel work sits over the next two years. McNerney's stated direction, moving away from a volume-led model and towards higher-margin, more selective work on complex projects, points at sectors like energy, data centres and infrastructure rather than repeatable, lower-margin builds. The closure of Modular Solutions is the clearest sign yet of where the company sees its competitive advantage, and where it doesn't.

What it means for careers and hiring

If your background is in modular or offsite manufacturing, Severfield's exit from that arm is worth watching closely, not because it signals modular is finished as a sector, but because it shows the UK's biggest steel fabricator has decided it can't compete there on margin. That capacity and those people are likely to move to other specialist modular contractors rather than disappear from the market.

For structural and project engineers, the more interesting signal is the pivot towards complex, high-engineering-value work. Fabricators chasing quality of earnings over volume need engineers who can handle bespoke design and sequencing challenges, not repeatable packages, and that tends to pay a premium over standard structural steel roles. Commercial managers and QS professionals with experience protecting margin on complex, non-standard contracts will find themselves increasingly in demand as Severfield and its peers reposition around fewer, harder projects rather than more, simpler ones.

Two new leadership hires this deep into a turnaround usually means the restructuring is entering its execution phase rather than its planning phase. If you have been waiting for the right moment to approach a business like this, that moment tends to be now, while teams are still being built out rather than settled.