South Africa's Murray & Roberts Holdings said yesterday its Dubai joint venture has been awarded a contract to build a terminal at Dubai's international airport.

The company said its 40 per cent share in the contract is valued at 6 billion rand ($585.2 million).

The contract will start immediately and would be completed by end-April 2011.

'It's good news for M&R. They had projects cancelled in the past few weeks,' Nedcor Securities construction analyst Gavin Bantam said.

M&R said earlier a key Dubai building project had been scrapped.

It added that its part of the Trump Towers project in Dubai was worth 3.2bn rand, of which 500m rand related to the current financial year.

M&R also said it will continue to participate in South Africa's nuclear power extension strategy, despite the state-owned utility Eskom's decision that it would not go ahead with the construction of its second nuclear power station, due to financial constraints.

'(We) are confident that the South African government will continue to pursue its low to zero emission power generation strategy outside of Eskom and will engage directly with the private sector to establish a second base-load operator, primarily based on modern nuclear technology,' the firm said.

The builder's shares rose as much as 6 per cent to trade 2.6 per cent stronger yesterday.-Reuters