"After close consideration we have now decided to withdraw from the steel construction operations of the company Byggsmederna AB. This means that we have had to make an allocation of NOK 38 million in the accounts for the third quarter," says Terje R. Venold, President & CEO of Veidekke. At the same time, however, he emphasises that this will not affect the company's strategy of continued operations in this region.

"We will continue our activities within building and construction," Mr. Venold adds.

"It is always unfortunate when we do not succeed entirely with the efforts we have put in as this case in Skåne, particularly as we are seeing such a positive development in our traditional building and construction operations in other parts of the Group," says the President & CEO. "Developing activities in new business areas is very challenging, and we were just beginning to take a brighter view of the development in Sweden."

In 2002, Veidekke took over the operations of Lennart Knutsson AB in Lund, Malmö and Hesingborg. The activities of those companies are traditional building and construction, as well as steel constructions for buildings, which at the time of acquisition accounted for about half of the turnover. Until the end of 2002 the steel construction operations yielded positive results. Because of difficult market conditions the company moved into geographical areas and other contract types of which they had no experience. Accordingly, this developed quickly into a negative situation, and so far this year the company has taken a loss of approximately NOK 13 million.

"Since this business area is not part of our core business, we have deemed it correct to withdraw rather than spend more resources on trying to turn the situation around," Mr. Venold says. "Part of the steel construction operations has already been closed down. At the same time we are discussing a sale, partial sale or continued operations in parts of this business area with other market players who have steel construction as their core activity."

For Veidekke, the financial consequences are a loss on operations of approximately NOK 13 million, and NOK 25 million divided between elimination costs, depreciation of goodwill and allocations for unforeseen events.

Any questions in connection with the above may be addressed to

Kai Krüger Henriksen, Senior Vice President, Communication, tel. +47 21 05 77 04 / 905 19 360

Arne Giske, Senior Vice President & CFO,

tel. +47 21 05 77 80 / 905 89 526

Ole Arnfinn Opsahl, Senior Vice President,

tel. + 46 7 33 559 944

Jørgen G. Michelet, Director, Finance and Investor Relations,

tel. + 47 21 05 77 22 / 917 43 856