Italian builder Astaldi merged into Webuild to escape bankruptcy protection

Astaldi, one of Italy's largest civil-engineering contractors — builder of metro lines, airports and motorways across Europe, the Middle East and Latin America — ran out of cash in 2018 under the weight of a huge project portfolio financed with short-term debt. In October 2018 it filed for concordato preventivo, Italian bankruptcy protection, with a plan to restructure around its strongest assets.

The concordato was approved and Astaldi's management ran a competitive process to find a strategic partner, formalized in 2020: Webuild, the group once led by Salini and now Italy's global champion in large infrastructure, would take over Astaldi's continuing business. Both sides were capital-constrained, but Astaldi's order backlog of metro, rail and bridge projects was complementary to Webuild's own pipeline.

The operation closed on 1 August 2021. Webuild absorbed Astaldi's going-concern business segments, issued new ordinary shares for the exchange, and delisted Astaldi on 2 August 2021. Astaldi's positive-balance-sheet remnant (the 'patrimonio destinato') remained a separate vehicle for creditors, isolating the debt from the operating company.

The merger was a classic sector consolidation: two contractors that could not each fix their own balance sheet found one balance sheet big enough for both, preserving thousands of jobs and dozens of public infrastructure commitments across the Mediterranean and the Americas.

Webuild absorbed Astaldi's operating assets on Aug 1 2021, keeping its contracts and becoming a top-5 global contractor

Merging order books let both groups bid for projects neither could fund or bond alone as separate entities

Placing the debt in a separate shell (patrimonio destinato) shielded the operating company from the past

The concordato process gave creditors a defined path, so they approved rather than forced liquidation

Scale after the merger made Webuild a credible global leader for the next wave of EU infrastructure spending

Two cash-starved giants can merge to clear one balance sheet while preserving order books neither could finance alone

Webuild became one of the world's leading transport-infrastructure contractors, with major projects in Italy, the US and the Gulf, and an order backlog in the tens of billions of euros. The Astaldi insertion is studied as a rare successful save of a distressed major contractor.