Displaying items by tag: Export
Tajikistan exports 0.99Mt of cement so far in 2020
30 October 2020Tajikistan: Data from the Ministry of Industry and New Technologies (MOINT) shows that Tajikistan exported 0.99Mt of cement in the first nine months of 2020. 0.56Mt of cement was exported to Uzbekistan, 0.39Mt to Afghanistan and 43,000t to Kyrgyzstan, according to Asia Plus. Local cement companies produced over 3.2Mt in the same period. The country has 16 registered cement plants with a total production capacity of 5.6Mt.
Algerian Ministry of Trade plans to export cement surplus
26 October 2020Algeria: The Ministry of Trade has drawn up a plan for the export of Algeria’s 20Mt/yr surplus cement, over 1.0Mt/yr of which is already being exported to Niger and other West African neighbours. Algeria Press Service has reported that the plan involves the country opening its land and sea borders for the cement, which constitutes 50% of the country’s 40Mt/yr total cement production.
Trade Minister Kamel Rexig said, “The surplus production will be exported and will thus guarantee an inflow of money amounting to US$900m/yr. The ministry has identified 10 national zones of production, including the export of cement, as a strategy for the year 2021.” He added, “The efforts made by economic and industrial operators to increase the volume of production intended for export in cement deserve to be encouraged.”
Algeria’s cement capacity first exceeded domestic consumption in 2017, prior to which it relied on cement imports from Tunisia.
Ciments de Bizerte resumes cement exports
23 October 2020Tunisia: Ciments de Bizerte dispatched its first batch of cement since 2008 from the Port of Bizerte on 19 October 2020. Agency Tunis Afrique Press has reported that the cement was sold on the Libyan market. The development follows Ciments de Bizerte’s investment in an upgrade of its quay at the Port of Bizerte.
Semen Padang exports 25,000t of cement to Australia
15 October 2020Australia/Indonesia: Semen Indonesia subsidiary Semen Padang says that it has dispatched a 25,000t batch of cement for Australia. Bisnis News Sumatra has reported that company is targeting total shipments of 1.58Mt to the country in 2020.
Senior manager of export sales Fifit Abriyanto said, “We are building connections with new customers. We already exported 35,000t of clinker to Bangladesh in September 2020.”
Cement short cuts
14 October 2020There’s no single theme this week, just a few news stories of note that may have wider significance.
Firstly comes the news that Semen Indonesia subsidiary Semen Padang has been exporting 25,000t of cement to Australia. This follows a consignment of 35,000t of clinker to Bangladesh. The company is hoping to hit a cement and clinker export target of 1.58Mt in 2020 in spite of the on-going coronavirus pandemic. It reached 1.09Mt (about 70%) of this by mid-September 2020 through exports to Bangladesh, Myanmar, Philippines, Australia, Sri Lanka and Maldives.
The wider picture here is that local sales in Indonesia fell by 7.7% year-on-year to 27.2Mt in the first half of 2020 from 29.4Mt in the same period in 2019, according to data from the Indonesian Cement Association (ASI). Cement and clinker exports are up by 32.8% to 3.7Mt from 2.8Mt. Semen Indonesia’s revenue is down but it has managed to hold its earnings up so far. During press rounds in late August 2020 its marketing and supply chain director, Adi Munandir, told local press that he expected domestic demand to fall by up to 15% in 2020 due to effects of coronavirus on private construction and government infrastructure plans. Analysts reckon that the worst of the demand slump hit in the second quarter of 2020 when government-related coronavirus restrictions were implemented, so Semen Indonesia’s third quarter results will closely scrutinised.
One of Semen Padang export targets is the Maldives. This chimes with another story this week because Oman-based Raysut Cement has just bought a majority stake in a cement terminal from Lafarge Maldives for US$8m. The 9000t capacity Thilafusi cement terminal is located on the island of Thilafusi, Kaafu and was expanded in 2015. Raysut Cement has tended to stick to markets in the southern Arabian Peninsula and the east coast of Africa, with projects planned in Madagascar and Somaliland. Yet expansion plans in places further away such as India and Georgia have also been mentioned publicly. A greater presence in the Maldives is a solid step towards Raysut heading eastwards. This would also mirror the plans of the country’s gypsum sector to dominate African and Asian markets and a general longer term shift in global markets from west to east.
One place west that has been doing well in cement though is Brazil. National Cement Industry Union (SNIC) data for September 2020 show a 21% year-on-year boom in cement sales to 5.8Mt and a 9.4% year-on-year increase to 44.6Mt for the first nine months of 2020. Earlier in the year the country’s limited coronavirus suppression methods were attributed for letting the recovering cement sector grow. Now, SNIC has directly thanked government support for civil construction. However, Paulo Camillo Penna, the president of SNIC said. “The results are surprising so far, but that doesn't give us security in the long run,” due to a bubble of real estate and commercial activity that already appears to be declining. Given the slump in cement demand from 2015 to 2018 it’s understandable that SNIC is taking the recovery cautiously.
And to finish we have two connected stories about Cemex. Following the release of its resilience strategy in September 2020, the company has now declared that its integrated Rüdersdorf cement plant in Germany will be the centrepiece of its CO2 reduction plans as part of ‘Vision Rüdersdorf.’ Details are light at present but we expect some kind of carbon capture and storage or usage project. An addendum to this – or perhaps it’s the other way round (!) – is that Cemex has also just announced further credit amendments but with sustainability-linked metrics. Cemex’s chief financial officer (CFO) Maher Al-Haffar said, “We are especially proud that this transaction represents one of the largest sustainability-linked loans in the world.” The teeth of this arrangement remain to be seen but the integration of finance and sustainability has serious implications generally.
Watch out for a research and development themed interview with Cemex and Synhelion in the December 2020 issue of Global Cement Magazine
Pakistan: Cement producers sold a record 5.21Mt of cement in September 2020, up by 22% year-on-year from 4.27Mt in September 2019. Exports were 1.12Mt, up by 41% from 790,000Mt. The Pakistan Observer has reported that domestic cement dispatches rose by 27% in northern Pakistan to 565,000t from 446,000t and by 16% in southern Pakistan to 3.52Mt from 3.03Mt.
Turkey: Exports of cement to Iran have fallen by 34% year-on-year in value in the first eight months of 2020 to US$9.30m from US$14.1m. All Turkish cement exports over the period totalled US$2.30bn, down by 2.3% from US$2.35bn. Cement accounted for 2.6% of the country’s total exports (US$88.4bn).
Update on Egypt: September 2020
30 September 2020The one thing that the Egyptian cement industry really didn’t need this year was any more jolts. Since the gargantuan 13Mt/yr government/army-run El-Arish Cement plant at Beni Suef opened in 2018, the sector has been stuck in production overcapacity and struggling to catch up. Yet, like the rest of us, they got one nasty surprise in the shape of the coronavirus pandemic. This has added stress to the whole situation and we can see some of this in various news stories that Global Cement has covered recently.
HeidelbergCement’s local subsidiary Suez Cement has been busy in recent days making changes to its corporate structure in the form of a tender offer to buy a 100% stake in Egyptian Tourah Portland Cement. Production stopped at Tourah Cement in June 2019 due to market conditions. This follows yet more lacklustre financial results earlier in September 2020 that show the pain that it and other cement producers have been enduring. Suez Cement’s loss nearly doubled year-on-year to Euro38m for the first half of 2020 and its sales fell by 18% to Euro145m. This was blamed on production overcapacity and a coronavirus-related lockdown. Other producers, both multinational and local, have experienced a similar situation.
Suez Cement also announced in mid-September 2020 that its Ready Mix Beton subsidiary had secured a contract for the supply of concrete for the construction of two new monorail lines connecting the country’s new city projects. Unfortunately, as Suez Cement’s chief executive officer (CEO) Jose Maria Magrina explained in an interview to Daily Egypt News in July 2020, “the New Administrative Capital (NAC) is a very big project, but in the end it has not offset the decrease in informal buildings that have been stopped.” Despite Suez Cement being a major supplier and the proximity of its plants to the site, overall sales have gone down.
Graph 1: Cement consumption in Egypt. Source: Cement Division of the Building Materials Chamber of the Federation of Egyptian Industries.
Magrina’s gloom is shared by other industry figures with a general assumption that perhaps up to a quarter of the country’s 20-something cement plants may have to close in the next year or so. Coronavirus has only deepened this view as the government’s response was to cease issuing construction licences for private buildings in Greater Cairo, governorate capitals and major cities from late May 2020 for six months. Solomon Baumgartner Aviles, the CEO of Lafarge Egypt, said in July 2020 that local cement demand fell by 6.5% year-on-year in the first half of 2020. He added that coronavirus had ‘strongly’ impacted the building materials sector with a big effect on the individual market, and with the licence halting exacerbating the situation further. As data from the Cement Division of the Building Materials Chamber of the Federation of Egyptian Industries shows above in Graph 1 demand peaked at 56.5Mt in 2016 and has since declined to a low of 48Mt in 2019. By month the sector recovered in January and February 2020 respectively with growing cement sales on a year-on-year basis but this has since declined with losses in most months subsequently. This is set against a production capacity of 81.2Mt/yr in 2018, giving an excess of 30Mt/yr and a utilisation rate of 59%.
One story that was mentioned in the local press this week is that Arabian Cement Company (ACC) had started negotiations with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Commercial International Bank – Egypt to secure new loans worth over US$20m. The ACC has denied this publicly in a statement to the Egyptian Exchange but it’s a sign of the trouble that is expected in the sector given the current circumstances.
All of this leaves cement producers scrabbling to hold on until the market picks up again, takes action in other ways or the government intervenes. Some analysts expect the market to stabilise in the medium to longer term as work on large infrastructure projects like the NAC mounts. Suez Cement’s Jose Maria Magrina has said that, “the government must, within the law, dictate norms that will rationalise the market, while making sure that companies survive since current prices do not cover the costs of production.” Local press has since reported that the Ministry of Trade and Industry has started trying to help cement companies, including measures such as limiting production to balance supply and demand, and decrease the surplus in the market. Another option is a coordinated export subsidy programme in coordination with the government but nothing appears to have happened yet after several years of discussion. Unhelpfully for any export aspirations, Egypt finds itself in a very cement export-heavy part of the world, wedged as it is between North Africa, Turkey and Southern Europe.
Hope springs eternal though as, almost unbelievably, Egyptian Cement Group’s CEO Ahmed Abou Hashima surfaced last week to remind everyone that his company still plans to inaugurate its new integrated cement plant in 2021. The project to build a new 2Mt/yr unit in Sohag has been brewing since 2017 when it was announced with China-based Sinoma on board as the engineering partner. It was originally scheduled to open in the first half of 2020 but it was delayed by coronavirus. Let’s hope the picture looks better when it finally opens.
Bashundhara Group plans 4Mt/yr cement plant in eastern Bangladesh
23 September 2020Bangladesh: Bashundhara Group has taken a loan of US$82.0, which it says will go towards the construction of a 4.0Mt/yr cement plant in eastern Bangladesh for a total investment of US$117m. The Daily Star newspaper has reported that the new plant will produce cement primarily for export to northeast India. Bashundhara Group’s two cement plants currently have the capacity to produce 5.1Mt/yr of its King Brand cement.
Bank Asia is the lead arranger for the syndicated loan, which it will provide along with Dhaka Bank, First Security Islami Bank, Pubali Bank, Social Islami Bank and United Commercial Bank. Full repayment is due in 2027.
Iran: Data from the Islamic Republic of Iran Customs Administration (IRICA) shows that cement producers exported 5.85Mt of cement in the first five months of the local 2021 financial year, which began on 20 March 2020. The value of cement exports fell by 52% year-on-year to US$128m from US$266m, according to the Tehran Times newspaper. Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan were the top destination for the exports. Cement was also sent to India, Russia, Qatar, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, China, and Oman.
In its 2020 financial year Iran exported a total of US$7.0bn-worth of building materials and produced 85Mt of cement against a domestic consumption of 65Mt.