Indeed, Leighton’s Australia-focused subsidiary is riding high on the wave of a Chinese-driven construction boom the likes of which, according to Stewart, we have never seen before.

And he says the construction boom is likely to forge on, despite the economic downturn in the United States and Australia’s softening domestic housing market.

“The middle-class Chinese all have aspirations to move to a higher level of life,” Stewart told ILNsister publication CIN.

“When you look at the numbers, if there’s a 10 per cent movement, that’s 100 million people who are all wanting cars, houses, roads and infrastructure just like we have.

“It’s extraordinary that out of that comes a mining boom, high employment, government royalties and money washing about to catch up on all the essential infrastructure that may have fallen away [in less prosperous times].

“It’s interesting that we might get a new hospital in Perth, or a new interchange or a new subdivision on the back of the Chinese economy, but that’s the reality. On the other side of the equation, you’ve got the Americans, who gave money away like it was out of control.

“So you’ve got these two dynamics. We’re in the biggest boom of all time at our level of construction – housing has obviously taken a bit of a hit with interest rates – and you’ve got the US economy going downwards.

But Stewart told CIN that John Holland did not envisage any change to the Chinese-driven high demand for infrastructure.

“John Holland has work-in-hand of $A6.5 billion,” he said. “Last year we turned over just under $3 billion. We’re currently tracking at just over $300 million [in turnover] a month, and that’s equivalent to $3.6 billion annualised turnover. I would expect that in 2010, we would exceed $4 billion in turnover.

“The big issue for us is making sure we have the capability of delivering to the demands of our clients. We’ve got to be very focused to ensure we’ve got the right clients, clients who have got opportunities that we can satisfy.

“Often, in these buoyant times, you see people go broke. It sounds quite weird, but we’re in a tough industry and we’ve really got to work to get what we want. We haven’t got a magic recipe like McDonalds or nine magic spices or anything like that. We just build things.”

Stewart said that while John Holland still had to compete for work in the market, the company had to be careful about how much and what kind of work it took on, so the work did not exceed the company’s capability.

“But I’ve been in the industry for 31 years, and it’s never been like this before,” he said. “All the previous booms have gone ahead and been followed by a downturn, and there’s no reason and no lack of appetite for our resources.

“The dynamics of people, of middle-class aspirational desires will just grow on, and the view of economists is that there will eventually be a flattening, but it won’t be a crash.”

John Holland is heavily involved in coal infrastructure upgrades in Queensland and New South Wales to ease bottlenecks in the coal supply chain.

Its expansion of the Dalrymple Bay coal terminal south of Mackay is two-thirds complete, and earlier this year the contractor won a $287 million expansion contract for Abbot Point Coal terminal.

The Abbot Point project includes a new ship-loader and will see the coal port capacity more than double in the next two years.