Growth was geographically widespread and across all market segments. Thanks to its selective contracting policy, Boskalis mainly worked on high quality projects that generated healthy margins.

Despite the high turnover level, a strong intake of new orders worth €2.9bn lifted the order book to an all time high of €3.6bn and provided a positive outlook for this year.

Boskalis has reached agreement with all insurers involved in compensation for their mega-trailing suction hopper dredger 'WD Fairway', which collided with a container vessel in China on 8 March 2007. The insurers have declared WD Fairway a constructive total loss and will compensate Boskalis for a total amount of €167m, of which €40m was received last year. The financial settlement will lead to a positive result for Boskalis of approximately € 100m before taxation, which will be recognized in the 2008 results.

Meanwhile, Boskalis major Dutch rival Van Oord has also reported impressive results for 2007, with net profit up 85% to €164m, turnover up to €1.652bn and an order book standing at €3.725bn. Some €1.15bn of the latter figure will be carried out this year, not including the Maasvlakte 2 extension of the Port of Rotterdam.

The global dredging market is driven by long term factors such as growth in world trade, the global population and energy consumption. Container transportation by sea is also showing strong growth, fuelled mainly by exports from China, which is developing its position as the global production centre. The demand for bulk materials such as iron ore and copper is increasing, also particularly from China, which means bulk transportation by sea is growing. Therefore, ports are deepened and expanded to absorb this growth.

Besides this, global urbanization is rapidly increasing due to both population growth and migration to cities in predominantly coastal areas, which as a result get overpopulated. This drives the demand for new land creation in coastal zones, generating large scale land reclamtion projects for the dredging industry.
Demand for energy also continues to grow steadily, prompting the oil and gas sector to develop new fields, often offshore. The dredging industry is part of these developments with the construction of new LNG ports, reclamation of new land for LNG plants and offshore pipeline protection.