Amit Birman and the business of letting go

An elevator is a modest place to look for a corporate strategy. It has doors, buttons and a maintenance contract. In August 2026, Shikun & Binui’s purchase of control in Naaman Elevators offered a particularly useful introduction to its chief executive, Amit Birman. Here was a construction group buying a business that could keep working long after the builders had packed up. The ribbon cutting would be someone else’s afternoon. There would still be elevators to service on Monday.

Days earlier, the group had signed an agreement to sell its energy company to Generation Capital for NIS 4.45 billion. Put those two transactions beside each other and Birman’s thinking becomes easier to follow. He was preparing to part with a substantial energy investment while adding a practical building service. The difference in scale was striking. So was the difference in what each business asked of its owner.

Birman had spent much of his career handling the financial machinery behind physical things: aircraft systems, engineering, infrastructure and property. He became Shikun & Binui’s permanent CEO in December 2024, after several months doing the job on an acting basis. His story carries an unusually concrete question about leadership: once you know how a business is financed, what do you decide it should actually do?

Before the concrete, the accounts

His route began in banking, followed by a finance leadership role in Elbit Systems’ unmanned aircraft division. He later became chief financial officer at Shapir Engineering. These were different settings, linked by the need to understand projects whose costs arrive before their rewards. Birman’s professional experience included project financing, capital raising, procurement and insurance. A construction site needs equipment; it also needs somebody who understands the promises that paid for it.

His education supplies another part of the picture. At Tel Aviv University he studied economics and accounting, and completed a real estate appraisal program. At Bar-Ilan University he earned an executive MBA. He is a certified public accountant. An appraiser asks what an asset is worth; an accountant follows what has happened to the money. Running a group requires making decisions before either answer is comfortably final.

At Shapir, he helped bring the Shapira brothers’ privately held businesses into a public group through an initial public offering. That experience placed him at the meeting point of operating companies and outside investors. A public listing changes the audience. Decisions that once stayed around a family table become matters for shareholders, disclosures and recurring scrutiny. Birman’s later career would keep him at that same junction.

On October 1, 2020, he began as Shikun & Binui’s deputy CEO and chief financial officer. The appointment disclosure recorded ten years at Shapir. He arrived with experience inside another engineering business, rather than through an unrelated consumer or technology company. For someone whose eventual task would involve deciding where a contractor’s advantages began and ended, that background matters.

The job came with a search committee

In the summer of 2024, Shikun & Binui’s leadership changed amid tension between chief executive Tamir Cohen and controlling shareholder Naty Saidoff. Cohen left. Birman, already the deputy CEO and finance chief, took on the acting CEO position. The board’s appointment was made on July 4 and publicly reported on July 7. Continuity now had a name, while the company considered who should lead it permanently.

The search did not simply end at the nearest desk. Other candidates were considered before Birman secured the permanent role that December. His five months in charge gave the board something more useful than an interview performance: a period of actual decisions. An acting appointment can look provisional from the outside. Inside the business, the decisions still have to be made, and their consequences do not wait for a permanent title.

The setting was demanding. By July, the company’s shares had fallen sharply from their 2021 highs, while leverage and expensive projects had drawn attention. The Sde Dov rental housing investment became a particularly visible part of that debate. Birman had been finance chief during the preceding period. His promotion brought responsibility for changing the direction of a group whose finances he already knew closely.

There is a particular awkwardness to an internal turnaround appointment. Familiarity is an advantage, and it also leaves little room to act surprised. The new CEO knows the vocabulary, the contracts and the people. He must then persuade those same people that familiar arrangements can change. Birman’s subsequent decisions offer a better account of how he approached that problem than any ceremonial appointment photograph.

A smaller map, a larger responsibility

One early change concerned geography. By late 2024, the company was separating its discontinued African activities from continuing operations. It also reached an end to a business dispute in Colombia. These moves made the operating picture more focused. They did not make the practical work of exiting markets disappear: contracts and obligations do not obediently fold themselves when a board changes a presentation.

At a July 2025 economic conference, Birman explained his preference for concentrating on Israel and the United States. His argument concerned comparative advantage and the limits of managerial attention. A company could operate across many countries and still struggle to supervise them all. A crowded map looks impressive on a slide; somebody has to answer for every dot.

He also said he had appointed more than 40 new managers. That is a revealing companion to the geographical retreat. The task involved changing who made decisions as well as where those decisions applied. His phrase, translated from Hebrew, was plain: “We make data-based decisions.” The claim established a standard against which the choices could be judged, rather than giving the audience a particularly decorative slogan.

“We make data-based decisions.”

Amit Birman · July 2025 · translated from Hebrew

The sale that defined the argument

By July 29, 2026, Shikun & Binui and Generation had signed the energy transaction. The agreed NIS 4.45 billion consideration made it a consequential transaction for the seller and a significant expansion for the buyer. Regulatory approvals remained part of the transaction process. For Birman, an agreement on paper was the means to alter what his group could finance and where it could spend management time.

The company’s second-quarter announcement laid out the expected consequences with useful precision. It projected after-tax cash proceeds of NIS 2.7 billion to NIS 2.9 billion, and a reduction in consolidated net debt of NIS 5.5 billion to NIS 5.7 billion. Those were forecasts tied to the transaction, rather than cash already sitting in an account. The distinction matters whenever an ambitious future is being described in present-tense excitement.

Parent-company debt and consolidated debt tell different stories. The first concerns the parent itself; the second also reflects the businesses consolidated into its accounts. Selling a subsidiary can change both, through proceeds and through removing its debt from the group’s reporting perimeter. A sale price, therefore, cannot simply be treated as the amount available for the next acquisition. The accounting has its own plumbing.

In September, Birman explained the strategic reasoning. Developing energy assets required substantial equity capital, a scarce resource for the group. He wanted contracting and services to take priority. He also set an aspiration of doubling the company’s then roughly NIS 10 billion market value by 2030. That was his target. The interesting tension lay in seeking growth while disposing of a business associated with growth.

The work after the ribbon

Birman’s July plans included buying elevator and building-control companies and expanding building operations and maintenance. It was a recognisable extension of construction: stay involved in the systems that make a finished building usable. The customer who commissions a project may eventually need somebody to keep it running. A builder with service capabilities can seek a longer relationship with that customer.

The Naaman acquisition gave that argument a specific example. Elevators require installation, inspections, repairs and maintenance throughout their working lives. Control of a supplier can also connect purchasing and delivery more closely to a contractor’s projects. Those are the commercial attractions of the move. Whether they translate into attractive returns depends on price, execution and the quality of the service delivered.

That last part is easy to overlook in discussions of strategy. A maintenance business is made of appointments kept, faults diagnosed and calls answered. Recurring revenue still has to be earned repeatedly. It suits the practical emphasis of Birman’s plan that the next chapter includes equipment people notice most when it stops working. An elevator offers an admirably direct customer satisfaction survey: did it arrive?

The company was also preparing for Israel’s metro project through cooperation with Webuild and TREVI, and looking to expand in the United States. Birman’s proposed future retained substantial engineering ambition. The revised approach connected that ambition to contracting, supply and operation, with the energy sale intended to provide financial room. The group would still build complicated things. It would be more selective about the investments sitting alongside them.

What remains on his desk

Birman’s career has moved from explaining the accounts to deciding the shape of the enterprise behind them. The distinction becomes visible in choices such as exiting a geography, changing managers or selling a subsidiary. Each changes what the next set of accounts will contain. The finance chief’s knowledge remains useful, but the CEO has to choose which activities deserve the group’s next commitment.

His record now includes an internal promotion through an unsettled transition, a narrower geographical focus and a signed energy sale intended to fund the next stage. The plans for services supply a practical measure of what follows. Buying a business is an event. Making it work with the rest of a group is a succession of ordinary working days. Birman’s next results will be assembled there.