Foreign opportunities

Overseas construction projects have been crucial to some locally based firms as they weather San Diego County’s lingering slowdown in most building sectors.

And there could be more work to come inside and outside the United States in the next decade. A report commissioned by the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP predicts global construction will grow 67 percent from $7.2 trillion today to $12 trillion by 2020.

Growth in China, India and the U.S. is expected to spur more than half the increase, with China and India driving much of the growth in emerging markets thanks to rising populations and rapid urbanization.

“Construction will become one of the exciting global growth industries of the next decade, driven by emerging markets and the U.S. rebound,” said Neil Blake, director of economic analysis at research firm Oxford Economics Ltd., in a statement accompanying the March 3 release of the PwC report.

The report is based on research by Oxford Economics and consulting firm Global Construction Perspectives Ltd. It notes that China, boosted by its government’s stimulus spending, overtook the U.S. in 2010 to become the world’s largest construction market.

Researchers predict that China’s construction market will more than double in size during the next decade to $2.5 trillion, or 21 percent of world construction.

As the recession squelched Southern California projects the last three years, companies such as San Diego-based McCullough Landscape Architecture Inc. were able to capitalize on China’s construction boom.

The company in October completed landscape design work for a 200-acre amusement park being developed in the Chinese province of Fushun. Working with The Goddard Group, a noted Los Angeles-based designer of theme parks around the globe, McCullough oversaw landscaping elements for Fushun Dream World’s high-rise hotel, shopping district, water park and five theme-specific neighborhoods.

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