Set to top out at 400 m, the 76-storey CMA Tower in Saudi Arabia will be the tallest building in the city of Riyadh, in whose King Abdullah Financial District it stands. The CMA Tower is being built by SBG, a firm with a huge fund of experience in highrise construction. The tower stands out for its gigantic nine-sided CIP concrete core, whose 40 m cross-section makes it big enough to be a skyscraper in its own right. An ingenious formwork solution from Doka is in use for the 100 casting sections. At present, SBG has an uncommonly tough challenge to deal with: incorporating a three-storey-high steel construction into the CIP concrete core.

As a company which has operated successfully for decades on a worldwide scale, the Amstetten-based Umdasch Group has once again demonstrated a significant growth dynamic in 2011 within its companies Doka Division (concrete formwork technology) and Umdasch Shopfitting Division (shopfitting). By the end of 2010 a considerably improved economic environment was in evidence; during 2011 this resulted in revenues of € 968 million for the Umdasch Group, an increase of seven percent; there was an equally encouraging increase in the result of ordinary business activities to € 73 million (an increase of 22 percent!). This optimistic outlook for the future was also evident in the 41 percent increase in investment volume (a total of € 55 million). Worldwide the Umdasch Concern employed an average staff of approx. 7,100 in 2011 (an increase of 3.4 percent) – the current total is approx. 7,300. A stable and positive economic climate in most markets allows us to expect a continuation of this encouraging trend in 2012.

Doka has won another landmark, the super-high-rise Lokhandwala Minerva building in Mumbai.

Construction professionals presented latest formwork safety methods

In the ongoing worldwide expansion of the Doka Group, logistics has a key role to play. Doka formwork solutions are in day-to-day use all over the world, and need to be made available rapidly at sales and logistics locations in more than 70 countries. With its new international Logistics Centre – ‘iLOC’, for short – Doka has put its logistics on a brand-new long-term footing. After a build-time of only 7½ months, the 50,000 m² iLOC facility at St. Georgen-am-Ybbsfelde has now commenced full-scale operation. The iLOC is also a highly forward-looking development in terms of its energy efficiency and sustainability.

The University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna, this year invites entries for the eleventh international Josef Umdasch Research Prize, which is endowed with 30,000 euros in prize money. Instituted in memory of the founder of the Umdasch Group, this prize is one of Europe’s premier awards for research in the field of forestry and timber science, a fact which is underlined by the high quality of the research papers submitted over the years. The deadline for the submission of entries for the 2012 Josef Umdasch Research Prize is 31st July 2012.

A 26 km long 4-lane motorway, the M51, is being built to link Kliplev and Sønderborg in southern Jutland, around 15 km away from the border between Denmark and Germany.

La Défense is a modernistic high-rise commercial district in Paris. With over three million square metres of floorspace, this is the biggest office location in Europe, accommodating more than 150,000 office staff. 1600 firms – among them some of the biggest corporations in both France and the world – are represented in La Défense. A new prestige project is the 166 m ‘Tour Carpe Diem’ tower being built for the insurance group Aviva. Designed to Green Building Standards, it is scheduled for completion in 2012. The ‘Doka automatic climbing formwork SKE50 plus’ system is keeping operations moving ahead very fast on this project, despite the cramped conditions on the site. Used here as a protection screen, the Doka ‘Automatic climbing formwork Xclimb 60’ system is ensuring high workplace safety on this build.

The McCarran International Airport is the primary commercial airport serving Las Vegas and Clark County, Nevada. In 2010, the airport recorded an estimated 39 million passengers passing through the terminal. With the growing need for expansion, the McCarran Airport Authority devised a plan for a new air traffic control tower to accommodate a terminal radar approach control (TRACON).

Doka's recently created Highrise Centre in Singapore brings together and focuses its automatic-climbing capabilities in the East Asia & Pacific Region. Thousands of miles away from the Group’s HQ in Austria, its building-construction clients can benefit from the concentrated expert knowledge and service offerings of one of the global formwork-technology sector’s leading players.