Atkins, the largest engineering consultancy in the UK, is drumming up its investments in China, to service the country's surging demand for high-tech construction and brow field site regeneration.

The company announced a 36 percent revenue increase on the Chinese mainland to 35.97 million pounds ($55.74 million) for the financial year that ended March 31.

However, the company's Hong Kong revenue recorded a 13 percent decrease to 39.24 million pounds. The group's overall revenue grew by 9.4 percent to 1.7 billion?pounds.

As China's economic structure is shifting from high growth to sustainability, its construction sector is in great need of skills, technology and expertise to achieve energy conservation and carbon reduction.

"Every year, we get more and more involved in bringing technical know-how to China," Chris Birdsong, Atkins' Asia Pacific CEO said, citing Atkins' delivery of an energy-efficient design for the Bank of China's 200-meter tall Chongqing headquarters as an example.

"For customers like that who are looking to occupy their premises for many years to come, we have to make it more efficient to work in," he said, explaining that the building is constructed using LEED certification, an international standard for building sustainability stricter than the equivalent Chinese certification.

Birdsong said that Atkins has been doing business in China for more than 20 years, adding that the country is "very important" for the business. Its work started with master planning, but gradually moved to policy planning and high-end engineering, as the country's demand for technology like carbon reduction grew.

He said that one major investment Atkins has in China is to build a team of highly skilled engineering staff – consisting mainly of young Chinese graduates put on international training courses and sent abroad on rotational schemes to gain international experience.

?Around 60 percent of its 1,233 employees in Asia are based in China.

The company has traditionally had a larger presence in Hong Kong, where it currently works on large infrastructure projects such as Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway .

But Birdsong says Atkins' China presence is expanding "as the market opens up more", meaning local Chinese contractors are increasingly open to the option of cooperation with international construction service firms to deliver top quality construction.

An advantage Atkins claims is its experience in regenerating brown field sites, which are abandoned or underused industrial sites. Birdsong believes such expertise will give Atkins an advantage in bidding for construction projects in already-developed cities such as Guangzhou, Chongqing, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

"Unlike where you're building a massive city of 1 or 2 million people in the middle of nowhere, brown field site development has a completely different complexity, because of the social impact of the surroundings," Birdsong said.

The Intercontinental Shimao Wonderland Hotel in Songjiang is an example of Atkins' work on a brown field site. The project used low carbon design techniques such as green roofing, which will protect it from north winds and take advantage of the microclimate created by the thermal dynamics of the quarry rock face.

Atkins is the official engineering design services provider for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, which is also built on a brown field site.

"We are on a journey of how to bring our expertise in the mainland Chinese market," said Birdsong, stressing the company's continued commitment to invest in China.

Meanwhile, other multinational construction service firms are eyeing opportunities in China. Hyder Consulting, another engineering consultancy firm, also opened a new office in Chongqing last year.

It has recently secured a framework contract for the Hong Kong housing association, and is also working with the Hong Kong government on a greening master plan for the city.