Skanska booked more work in a single quarter than at any point in the company’s history. The Stockholm-based contractor reported 68 billion Swedish krona, roughly $7 billion, in Q2 order intake, up 20% year over year, with 39.5 billion of it booked in the United States.
Backlog at 21 months
The backlog number is the one worth sitting with. It reached 297.5 billion krona, about 11% higher than a year ago and equal to 21 months of work. CEO Anders Danielsson called that “unusually high,” and it’s two months longer than the figure the company reported in March.
Twenty-one months of backlog changes how a contractor behaves. It means the bid desk can decline work, price risk properly instead of buying jobs, and staff to a known curve rather than guessing. For a business that spent 2023 and 2024 watching private nonresidential starts erode, that’s a materially different operating position.
Operating profit came in at 2.1 billion krona, about 17% above Q2 2025, with 1.8 billion from the construction unit. CFO Pontus Winqvist was careful about the read-through: “This quarter was a very good one, but we always say you can’t build a trend on one quarter.” He added, “Generally I would say it’s a good market out there.”
Data centers, and the risk attached to them
Roughly 10% of Skanska’s backlog is data center work. Asked about New York’s new freeze on hyperscale permits, Winqvist drew the line that matters for every general contractor in this market: “we are not developing any data centers. We are doing the construction for others.”
That’s the correct distinction, and it’s also the whole exposure question. Contractors don’t carry siting or offtake risk. They carry the risk that a developer’s project stops before the contract converts to revenue, which is exactly what a state permit pause does. Ten percent of backlog is small enough to absorb and large enough to notice.
What the quarter says about the U.S. market
More than half of the intake came from the U.S., in a quarter when construction spending was flat and single-family starts fell for a third straight month. Those two facts aren’t contradictory. The money moved into large, complex, mostly institutional and infrastructure work, which is precisely where a contractor of Skanska’s size competes.
Q2 wins included appointment as master developer on the $8 billion Penn Station renovation in New York, of which about 70 million krona was booked in the quarter. That’s a rounding error on the intake number and a significant position on one of the largest transportation projects in the country. Related work moving in the same market includes Second Avenue Subway Phase 2. Source: Construction Dive.