The original company, W. S. Atkins & Partners, was established by
William Atkins in 1938. In 1996, W. S. Atkins was admitted to the
London Stock Exchange and began trading as W. S. Atkins plc. That same year, it also acquired
Faithful+Gould, a cost and project management consultancy firm. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Atkins played a key role in the engineering of the
Channel Tunnel; completed in 1994, it possesses the longest underwater section of any tunnel in the world. In 2002, the company begun trading under the Atkins name. That same year, it also bought Hanscomb, construction consultants. During the early 2000s, the company experienced a period of financial difficulties, resulting in the share price falling to 50p in 2002 and the company's Chief Executive,
Robin Southwell, resigning along with Finance Director Ric Piper, who was also told his new job at
Trinity Mirror was no longer open to him. Keith Clarke replaced him, joining from
Skanska. Atkins was one of the five shareholders in
Metronet, the
London Underground maintenance company that failed in 2007, after which Atkins was forced to write off its investment in the venture. During 2009, Atkins was selected as the official engineering design services provider for the
2012 Summer Olympics; the company provided
building services design,
civil engineering and
structural engineering, acoustics,
fire protection engineering, and accessibility services. As a consequence of the general economic downturn experienced during the
Great Recession, Atkins reduced its headcount as a cost-saving measure; approximately 3000 staff left the business between April 2009 and February 2011, although the overall headcount remained relatively stable following the acquisition of the American company PBS&J during August 2010. The purchase of PBS&J, a Florida-based provider of engineering, planning, architecture, construction, environmental, and program management services, was viewed as a major buy into the
North American market for Atkins. Although Atkins had not traditionally involved itself in the aerospace sector, the firm decided to build up its presence in the market, quickly forming links with British aero engine manufacturer
Rolls-Royce Holdings and the multinational aerospace firm
Airbus. Its first major aerospace project was to perform a stress-check analysis of the wing proposed for the
Airbus A380 airliner, later expanding to perform work on the wings of the
Airbus A320 and
Airbus A350 XWB airliners as well as the
Airbus A400M Atlas military airlifter. Atkins was reportedly keen to expand within the North American region, particularly with
Boeing and its supply chain. The company's own analysis noted that Europe's high speed rail network was expected to expand three-fold between 2008 and 2020, while passenger rail travel in the UK was growing far faster than official forecasts had predicted. In 2001, the UK's
Strategic Rail Authority commissioned Atkins to produce a feasibility study into the business case for, and the transportation impact of, high-speed railways. During January 2011, an Atkins-led consortium was selected to engineer a 180 km high speed line between the
Danish capital of
Copenhagen and the German border. In April 2019, the company was appointed to plan
Sweden's first high speed main line. In June 2011, Atkins announced it was buying the
oil and gas business of Finnish global consulting firm
Pöyry for €17.25 million; as a result of this acquisition, around 130 staff from Pöyry's
Perth,
Stavanger and
Aberdeen offices integrated into Atkins' Energy business unit. During October 2014, Houston-based oil and gas offshore engineering business
Houston Offshore Engineering was acquired for £45 million, added another 150 people to the business and increased the headcount of oil and gas specialists to over 1,000 within its operations worldwide. That same year, Atkins had made a bid to purchase
Parsons Brinckerhoff from
Balfour Beatty, but were outbid by
WSP Global. In April 2016, the company announced the acquisition of the Projects, Products and Technology (PP&T) segment of
EnergySolutions for £206 million, strengthening Atkins' nuclear multidisciplinary capability to a 2,000-strong global team. During April 2017, Atkins received a £2.1bn bid from Canadian company
SNC-Lavalin. On 21 April, it was announced that the takeover deal had been agreed; the move was approved by shareholders in June 2017. This step coincided with news of 92 redundancies in the company's infrastructure division. The deal was completed on 3 July 2017, with Atkins becoming SNC-Lavalin's fifth business sector. Atkins was delisted from the London Stock Exchange with effect from 4 July 2017. During the
COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, Atkins announced it was cutting around 280 jobs from its UK infrastructure division, blaming "unprecedented uncertainty" in the sector from which it did not expect to see a bounce back "in the short to medium term." == Operations ==