Southland Holdings, Inc.

Southland Holdings, Inc. is a heavy civil construction group headquartered in Grapevine, Texas and listed on NYSE American under the ticker SLND. The company works through operating subsidiaries including Johnson Bros. Corporation, Southland Contracting, Mole Constructors, Oscar Renda Contracting, American Bridge Company and Heritage Materials, covering bridges and transportation, tunneling, marine construction, water resources and specialty structures. Southland employed roughly 1,800 people at the end of 2025 and reported about $2.0 billion in remaining unsatisfied performance obligations. Its Johnson Bros. unit built the downstream cofferdam for the Kentucky Lock Addition on the Tennessee River. The company became publicly traded in 2023 through a combination with Legato Merger Corp. II.

Southland is best understood as an assembly of older contractors kept intact rather than merged out of existence. The group traces more than 120 years of continuous work through its subsidiaries, and each one arrived with its own founding story and speciality.

American Bridge Company was formed in 1900 as a J.P. Morgan-engineered merger of 28 bridge and steel companies, and a year later began building what became the world’s largest steel fabrication plant at Ambridge, Pennsylvania. It joined Southland in 2020 and still runs its own in-house engineering department, pairing designers with field crews to work out erection means and methods. Johnson Bros. Corporation started in 1929 as Johnson Construction under Walter D. Johnson, joined the group in 2012, and was the first contractor in the United States to use incremental launching, on the Belleair Beach Causeway Bridge. Oscar Renda Contracting was established in 1974 by Oscar Renda after he emigrated with his brother Rudolph, and has since installed more than four million linear feet of pipeline. Southland Contracting grew out of Charlie Griffith’s tunnelling work in 1981 and has built projects spanning more than 5,000 miles of alignment worldwide.

Footprint and standing

The operating map covers thirteen U.S. offices plus Vancouver and Mississauga in Canada, with American Bridge run from Coraopolis, Pennsylvania and Johnson Bros. from Orlando. Engineering News-Record places the group third in water transmission lines, fifth in bridges, eighth in sanitary and storm sewers, ninth in both marine and port facilities and water supply, and tenth in water treatment and desalination plants.

The landmark list runs to genuinely unusual engineering. The original San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge remains the longest bridge of its kind in the world. On the Mill Creek Drainage Relief Tunnel the crews executed a bore diameter change from 38 feet to 32 feet miles into the drive. The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project delivers long-term supply to communities drawing on depleting and poor-quality groundwater. The Las Vegas High Roller is the tallest observation wheel in the western hemisphere.

On procurement, Southland says it is continually looking for qualified partners, subcontractors and suppliers, and actively encourages bids from DBE, MBE, WBE, DVBE and SBE contractors. It runs an independent fraud and ethics hotline for reporting.