The company was formed when a team of engineers acquired Construcciones Padrós S.A., a construction business which had been in financial difficulty, in 1983. The company acquired a majority holding in Cobra, a support services business, and merged with OCISA S.A. to create OCP Construcciones, S.A. in 1993; it went on to merge with Ginés Navarro Construcciones, S.A. to create Grupo ACS in 1997.[5] It subsequently bought Onyx SCL, an environmental contractor, in 1999 and stakes in Xfera and Broadnet, telecommunications businesses, in 2000 before going on to acquire Dragados S.A., a large contractor established during World War II to dredge the Port of Tarifa and which had subsequently gained extensive experience in hydro-electric and civil engineering work, in 2003.[6]