• More than half of E&C executives rank pursuing integrated infrastructure programmes among their top growth actions, and close behind is entering the field of life-cycle services.
• Capturing demand takes more than coordination. Firms must orchestrate the delivery system by deciding what to own or access; where control sits; and how information, incentives, and risk are shared.
• Ambitions to compete in life-cycle services may be outpacing investment: 44% of E&C companies want to expand into the offering, but only 12% expect to prioritise investment in it.

Engineering and construction (E&C) projects run on coordination. No major project succeeds without keeping designers, contractors, suppliers, labour, schedules, capital, and risk in sync across hundreds of interfaces. But as the ensemble involved in delivery grows larger and more complex, firms will increasingly need to move from coordinating the players to orchestrating the whole performance—deliberately deciding what to own or access; where control sits; and how information, incentives, and risk are shared.

The world is entering another major cycle of investment in the built environment. PwC’s Global Infrastructure Outlook projects roughly US$151 trillion of infrastructure investment through 2050, opening new pools of demand across transport, power, digital infrastructure, industrial capacity, water, and other long-lived assets. 

Large capital cycles are nothing new for E&C. The sector has adapted repeatedly as urbanisation, industrialisation, new technologies, and changes in energy systems have created new waves of demand. But this cycle has a distinguishing feature: fewer of its opportunities behave as standalone assets. More and more, growth is taking shape across interconnected systems—and E&C firms play a critical role in making these systems work together in the physical world. Data centres draw on power, grid, and water infrastructure. Electrification ties transport to power systems. Advanced manufacturing increasingly depends on power, digital, and transport infrastructure.

At the same time, customers are pulling E&C firms into later stages of the asset life cycle. PwC’s survey of 377 E&C executives worldwide finds that they rank integrated life-cycle support—designing and building an asset, then helping commission, maintain, and operate it over time—just behind the traditional customer expectations of a high-quality asset delivered on time and on budget.

In effect, the system E&C firms must orchestrate is expanding in two dimensions at once: horizontally, across more interconnected infrastructure systems, and vertically, across more of the asset’s life. That changes the environment every firm works in, whether it’s integrating a multi-asset programme or supplying one component within it.

It also means market selection and the delivery model are becoming more tightly linked. Choosing attractive opportunities will always matter. But which opportunities a firm can profitably pursue now depends greatly on how well it can orchestrate what it takes to deliver them.

Portfolios in motion

Those choices are showing up in firms’ growth priorities. More than half (52%) rank expanding into integrated infrastructure programmes that combine multiple asset systems among their three most important actions for capturing growth over the next five years. In fact, it’s the most widely selected strategic action in the survey. 

The portfolio shift is already underway. Nearly all respondents (91%) expect their firm’s share of revenue from specific asset classes and end markets to change by at least 5 percentage points, making portfolio change nearly universal across the sector. About a third (29%) anticipate shifts of 20 percentage points or more. The strongest net movement is towards infrastructure, accompanied by increased exposure to industrial projects and reduced exposure to buildings.

Data centres stand out as the clearest new opportunity. PwC projects US$31.6 trillion to flow into the asset class through 2050, with about US$3.2 trillion of that capital going into construction. Firms are positioning themselves accordingly: the share expecting data centre revenue rises by about 20% over the next five years, the largest relative increase of any asset class—and the average proportion of revenue that respondents expect from their data centre work rises by 26%.

E&C executives also expect asset classes that enable data centre expansion to make up a larger chunk of their work. Power, utilities, and grid infrastructure—already well established in E&C portfolios—sees its mean revenue share rise by around 11% in the next five years. Other significant growth pockets are renewable energy, storage, hydrogen, and carbon capture (collectively increasing revenue share by 26%) and advanced manufacturing (rising by 24%).

Taken together, the findings point to a selective portfolio rebalancing. Although some firms are beefing up their exposure to data centres, others are concentrating growth elsewhere within infrastructure and industrial markets. 

Leaning into the life-cycle opportunity

The growth opportunity isn’t only in what E&C firms build. It’s also in how much of an asset’s life they support.

Asked to identify the attributes that will matter most to customers over the next five years, E&C executives first point to the fundamentals of project delivery: quality (placed in the top three by 48% of respondents), speed (43%), and schedule and budget certainty (40%). However, integrated life-cycle support followed close behind, at 34%.

Many E&C firms are responding to the market. Some 44% rank expansion into life-cycle services among their three most important actions for capturing growth, putting it level with expanding into new customer segments and behind only pursuing integrated infrastructure programmes.

The ambition runs stronger among “future-fit” firms, which is our term for the top 20% of respondents based on a composite measure of their responses across four dimensions: strategic agility, risk-adjusted growth, delivery certainty, and the ability to manage scarce capacity. Our analysis indicates these firms are better positioned to adapt to change and translate growth opportunities into reliable delivery. And they’re roughly 25% more likely than the sector overall to prioritise expanding into life-cycle services.

Moving further in the life cycle extends customer relationships beyond the capital project and opens recurring sources of revenue, such as long-term contract agreements to operate and maintain assets or managed services for functions such as monitoring, performance management, and technical support. But the survey exposes a tension between that ambition and where investment is growing fastest. Only 12% of respondents name asset operations, maintenance, and life-cycle services among the three parts of their value chain expected to see the largest percentage increase in investment over the next five years. That finding doesn’t tell us how much firms are investing in life-cycle capabilities in absolute terms, but it does raise a question about whether investment is keeping pace with the growth opportunity firms say they want to pursue.

Orchestrating the delivery system

As projects span more assets and phases of the life cycle, firms need to make more deliberate choices about how the delivery system itself is designed and governed.

They’re making those choices amid real constraints. Roughly two-thirds of respondents cite talent shortages and skills gaps as barriers to growth, and around half point to supply chain and long-lead equipment issues or difficulty securing delivery capacity as barriers.

The survey suggests firms will build some of the capabilities they need themselves and assemble others through partnerships. Nearly three-quarters (72%) say they’re going to develop capabilities in-house, whereas 62% plan to tap into ecosystem partners. The strategic question is how to combine the two: E&C companies must decide what needs to sit inside the firm, what can be accessed through others, and where the firm needs enough control to protect delivery performance and margin.

Those choices become tangible at critical interfaces. In an integrated infrastructure programme, delivering each project successfully is only part of the job. A data centre and the substation supplying it, for example, may sit in different workstreams or organisations, but they still need to come together at the right time and to the right specification. Coordination keeps the schedules aligned. Orchestration establishes up front who owns the interface, who can resolve conflicting requirements, and how changes are managed across the projects. Done well, this orchestration can improve quality, speed, and certainty for the asset owner while reducing the delays, rework, and disputes that put E&C margins at risk. 

For life-cycle services, the critical interfaces occur at the handoffs between project phases. Construction information must remain intact and accessible for operations. Responsibility should transfer cleanly as delivery teams de-mobilise. Effective orchestration designs those handoffs so that knowledge, relationships, and accountability carry through from construction into operations.

Future-fit firms put more weight on the mechanisms that help manage interfaces across projects, partners, and life-cycle stages. They’re 20% more likely to prioritise investment in project and programme management, as well as in procurement and supplier management. 

Sector-wide, technology and commercial arrangements are evolving to make a broader, more distributed delivery system work. Technology can connect information across interfaces and handoffs, while commercial models determine how risk, reward, and incentives are shared. 

Along the value chain, the median share of respondents using advanced technology to a large or very large extent is expected to rise from 52% today to 69% within five years; among future-fit firms, it’s expected to rise from 62% to 81%. But adoption alone won’t enable orchestration. Technology deployed function by function can produce more sophisticated silos. The orchestration benefit comes when technology enables design, procurement, controls, field execution, and handover to operate from a consistent view of the project—and when that view extends across partners.

The change in commercial arrangements is just as significant, as firms move away from traditional fixed-price work towards models that support more integrated programmes and longer life-cycle relationships. Fixed-price contracts remain important, but only 46% of respondents rank such contracts among their top-three revenue opportunities over the next five years, down from 65% today. Among future-fit firms, the move is sharper still: the share falls from 59% to just 33%. At the same time, multiyear commitments, recurring life-cycle revenues, and shared-risk models will all gain ground. These models are better suited to relationships that span more projects, participants, and phases of the asset life cycle.

There’s no single orchestration formula. The strategic choices firms make around how to bring capabilities, partners, and resources together will ultimately reflect their business models and how they seek to compete.

Extending the remit, then wiring it together

Priorities for E&C companies around the world

Three ways to compete

Although E&C firms face a common market environment, they’re responding to it in different ways. Those responses cluster into three strategic archetypes:

Moving from builder to infrastructure owner-operator

Where to start

The scale of investment ahead means most E&C firms will have more opportunities than capacity to pursue them. That puts a premium on making orchestration choices deliberately, rather than allowing them to accumulate one bid, one partner, or one project at a time. Four choices involving control, boundaries, connections, and commercial terms deserve particular attention.

Choose the control points where the firm intends to earn an advantage. Don’t start by asking how much of the delivery chain to own. Instead, identify the few interfaces where superior performance would materially affect the economics or outcome of the work—such as those involving long-lead equipment, interconnection, systems commissioning, programme controls, and asset-data handover—and concentrate capability and investment there. The test is whether strength at those points improves something the customer values or the firm can monetise: speed, certainty, repeatability, lower risk, or continuity. If leaders across the business give different answers about where incremental margin is supposed to come from, the strategy probably isn’t yet clear enough.

Turn build-versus-access into an enterprise portfolio decision. Most firms are both building and accessing capabilities. The harder decision is which capabilities must remain proprietary because they underpin differentiation, pricing power, or control of risk, and which can be licensed, partnered for, or acquired. Write that distinction down rather than allowing it to emerge one project at a time. A useful test: if a competitor could reproduce the firm’s position by signing the same partners, where does the distinctive advantage actually reside?

Fund the connective layer. Data standards, common controls environments, partner onboarding, handover specifications, and cross-project capacity planning all sit between established functions. That makes them easy to underinvest in, even though they determine whether the wider system works. Give those interfaces clear ownership, budget, and measures of performance. Look for the boundaries where projects repeatedly lose time, information, or clear accountability; those friction points are often the best indication of where connective investment is needed.

Set margin and risk thresholds before an attractive pipeline tests them. Different routes to growth create different economic exposures. Decide in advance what return is required for the exposure being assumed, which risks the firm will retain, which should be shared, and which should disqualify a pursuit. The test is whether the commercial model matches the advantage the firm claims to have—and whether the expected return justifies what the firm must put at risk to deliver it.

Done well, orchestration can become more than a delivery discipline. It can help firms deploy scarce capacity towards the opportunities where they have a real advantage, protect margin through execution, and extend customer relationships into new sources of value. In a market with no shortage of demand, the ability to make the whole delivery system work in concert may separate firms that pursue growth from those that capture it.

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