5 minutes with … Tony Wells at Merit

2024-01-10T07:00:00

The firm’s founder and CEO would change ‘pretty much everything’ about the industry and sees a huge opportunity to innovate and transform construction’s archaic ways of working

Why did you choose construction as a career?

I never planned to be in the construction industry. I was originally at British Steel as an electrical and controls engineer and then moved into the semiconductor manufacturing industry and led world-wide benchmarking into wafer fabrication capital cost reduction and industrial engineering.

In 1996 the UK wafer fab I worked at closed and I had the choice to stay in semiconductors and go to Singapore or move into cleanroom facility construction with a large contractor. I chose the latter. After two successful UK/US start-ups, winning and delivering $300m of projects in China and the US, I decided to do it for myself, so I quit and took over Merit in 2002.

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