Wood Group confident on 2012 prospects

Engineering services firm Wood Group says it has seen growth across all its divisions in the first half of its financial year although downstream operations (building refineries to process oil and gas) are being hit by lower expenditure in the US.

Today's update makes clear there is a plethora of upstream projects with several of the construction majors including Daewoo, Chevron and Samsung working with Wood Group.

Wood Group PSN - which provides engineering support to existing facilities - is seeing "robust activity levels" while the turbines division, Wood Group GTS , is seeing "good" growth in underlying earnings.

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At the end of today's update the firm says it is confident of achieving full year performance "in line with expectations" - it is this which has probably seen the stock rise 5.2% in morning trading.

"Wood Group's IMS highlights a strong start to 2012, with performance in line with guidance for the full year, which anticipates further good progress in all three divisions," said analysts at Investec.

BS