UMA merges with AECOM

UMA Group, one of Canada’s largest consulting engineering firms, has announced that it is merging with a huge U.S. engineering and consulting firm, AECOM.Worldwide AECOM employs 17,000 people in 25 offices. It is operating in most sectors, including transit and highway sectors, water/wastewater, aviation, commercial and environmental management, commercial and industrial facilities. It bills itself as a firm offering design, engineering, project and construction management services, as well as offering outsourced staffing and logistical support. It is a private, employee-owned firm that has its headquarters in Los Angeles, California. It was named in Forbes magazine’s Top 500 Private Companies, the company is a $1.5 billion corporation. In the ENR 2004 top 500 Design Firms List, AECOM ranked first in transportation, first in sewer/waste and fourth overall.

UMA has 1,000 employees and 19 offices across Canada. In business for 90 years, it has its headquarters in downtown Vancouver. Jeremy Kon, P.Eng., Chair and CEO of UMA, suggested the merger with AECOM will give the firm more of an international base to serve clients: “Through our long history in the Canadian infrastructure market, we know many of our clients are facing a wider range of challenges and looking for global expertise to help them find the best solutions…. Being a part of AECOM will allow us to meet our clients needs for greater depth of talent that can be delivered anywhere around the world.”Kon said UMA will continue to operate under the same name, “and clients will be dealing with the same employees and management they are accustomed to.”

UMA began in 1911 in Saskatoon as a partnership between two young engineers working in municipal engineering: Franklin McArthur and A.A. Murphy. Ed Underwood and Roy McLellan joined the firm, purchased it in 1926 and renamed it Underwood & McLellan. The company did lots of work for the Department of National Defence in the 1930s and expanded across Canada in the 1960s, a time when it also started Spantec Constructors, now UMA Constructors. More recently, as part of a trend when firms adopted acronyms for their corporate identity, it became UMA Engineering.See www.umagroup.com, www.aecom.com