Alexander Dennis wins bulk of £60m Stagecoach contract

Transport group Stagecoach is investing £60 million in a fleet of 390 buses and coaches with the lion’s share of the orders going to Falkirk-based manufacturer Alexander Dennis.

The Perth-based transport group yesterday said the replacement buses for its regional network operations could be followed by further orders later this year.

The contracts follow an annual competitive tendering process and bring Stagecoach’s total investment in vehicles over the past five years to more than £370m.

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All but 24 of the vehicles, which will be delivered from May, will be built by Alexander Dennis with work carried out in Scotland, where it employs 900 people, as well as its Guildford and Scarborough sites.

Stagecoach founders Sir Brian Souter and Ann Gloag own a stake of just under 38 per cent in the bus manufacturer.

Optare, Van Hool, Volvo and Wrightbus will supply the remainder.

The contract comprises 95 double-decker buses, 87 single-deckers, 141 midi-buses, 11 mini-buses, 37 coaches and 19 hybrid vehicles.

Nine of the Alexander Dennis-built hybrid-electric vehicles are due to go into service in Aberdeen and Perth this summer with £1.8m of support from the Scottish Government’s Green Bus Fund.

The order also includes eight more vehicles for the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, which is the longest of its kind in the world and has been used by more than a million passengers since it opened in August last year.

UK bus managing director Les Warneford said: “This latest multi-million pound investment is part of our commitment to give local communities high quality, good value bus travel.”

Stagecoach carries around 2.5 million passengers on its 8,000 buses every day in a network stretching across the UK.

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As well as Scotland, its major bus operations are in London, Liverpool, Newcastle, Hull, Manchester, Oxford, Sheffield and Cambridge.

Alexander Dennis is Britain’s biggest bus and coach manufacturer and Europe’s leading supplier of hybrid-electric buses. It currently exports around 30 per cent of its output to markets including Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the USA.

The company saw turnover reach £283m in the year to December 2010 and increased pre-tax profits from £3.21m to £4.53m.

It is expected to report sales of around £360m in 2011 with further growth of up to 20 per cent expected this year.

At the end of last year, Alexander Dennis was linked to a bid for smaller rival Optare but later withdrew its interest.