Displaying items by tag: Government

Indonesia: Indonesian Cement Association (ASI) chair Lilik Unggul Raharjo has called for a more ‘robust’ approach to production overcapacity in the cement sector. In a statement by the ASI he lobbied for the government to strengthen its ban on the construction of new plants, according to the Jakarta Post newspaper and Kontan. At present the moratorium applies to obtaining licences via the country’s integrated electronic licensing system (OSS). Lilik also requested a better legal framework to protect the industry.

The government says it is using the block on investment in new cement plants to support the local sector. Restrictions are in place for regions such as Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan and Sulawesi. However, the government is ‘open’ to new plants being built in areas that have no existing units including Papua and Maluku.

ASI data shows that cement sales reached 77Mt in 2024 with a capacity utilisation rate of 65%. Domestic sales fell by just under 1% year-on-year to 65Mt in 2024. Exports grew by 10% to 12Mt. The ASI expects domestic sales of cement to increase by up to 2% in 2025.

Indonesia: A government scheme to build three millions houses per year is expected to boost demand for cement. Special envoy for climate change and energy, Hashim Djojohadikusumo, said that the country had secured financing from Qatar to construct four to six million housing units, according to Antara. An agreement has been secured with the UAE to build one million houses. Hashim also mentioned that countries including China, Türkiye, India and Singapore had expressed interest in investing. The government’s housing budget plan for 2025 is currently valued at around US$310m.

India: The Cement Manufacturers’ Association (CMA) has praised the Indian government’s Union Budget 2025 – 2026 for its ‘sustained core focus’ on infrastructure, housing and sustainable development. United News of India has reported that the budget provides for interest-free loans for state governments’ infrastructure projects and additional funding for research and development.

The CMA said that this aligns with its own development goals, within which it envisions the cement sector playing a growing role in a ‘sustainable, resilient’ economy.

Vietnam: The general director of Vietnam Cement Industry Corporation (VICEM), Nguyen Thanh Tung, says that Vietnam will suffer continued cement overcapacity amid high production costs in 2025. Full-year production is forecast at 125Mt, 96% greater than an expected domestic demand of 63.5Mt. Việt Nam News has reported that Vietnam’s cement exports face an on-going investigation in Taiwan, and are already subject to anti-dumping duties in the Philippines.

VICEM aims to raise its domestic clinker sales volumes by 8% year-on-year to 18Mt, in order to generate sales of US$1.16bn. To this end, Tung urged the government to adopt cement reinforcement in roadbuilding, as well as lifting the export tax on cement.

Kenya: The High Court has opposed the appointment of Bruno Oguda Obodha as the managing director of East African Portland Cement (EAPCC). The court took action following a petition in late December 2024 that argued that the selection process was opaque and not accountable to the public, according to the Nation newspaper. Oguda was chosen for the role by the country’s president William Ruto. However the role of the Public Service Commission in the appointment process has been questioned by the court. The vacancy for managing director post at EAPCC was announced in October 2024.

Kenya: The Ministry of Mining has ordered the shut down all mining operations at East Africa Portland Cement Company due to a US$4m debt the company owes the government. The cement producer has also been accused of operating illegally since 2016, according to Citizen Digital. Its sites have reportedly been lacking safety equipment, not registering vehicles that transport limestone and other infringements. Police have been sent to the company’s quarries to ensure they stop work.

The East Africa Portland Cement Company runs quarries at Portland and Sparetech in Kajiado and Kibini in Sultan Hamud.

Afghanistan: The office of the deputy prime minister for economic affairs says that the country has invested over US$600m in the cement sector since the Taliban administration took charge in 2021. It cited a US$1m renovation project at the Jabal Saraj cement plant in Parwan province, according to National Afghanistan TV and the BBC. Future investment projects are also planned for Jabal Saraj as well as the Temtaq plant in Jowzjan province and the Herat cement factory in Herat province.

At present the local cement sector has a reported production capacity of 5Mt/yr.

US: The Portland Cement Association (PCA) has asked the US Department of Energy to add alternative fuels to its Material Circularity Framework. It said that alternative fuels in the cement manufacturing process are better for the environment than the use of traditional fuels and that it diverted a significant amount of materials from landfill. The PCA said that the DOE’s Framework “…should address how to promote circularity through alternative fuels and replacement of raw materials to promote reducing greenhouse gases emissions.”

The DOE released its draft strategic framework ‘Circularity for Secure and Sustainable Products and Materials’ in October 2024. It asked for feedback from stakeholders by mid-December 2024. The framework is intended to identify opportunities and challenges to use circularity to decarbonise industry, secure supply chains, benefit communities and create jobs. The draft mentions recycling concrete and generating secondary cementitious materials from recovered material streams.

Typical! We published a cement sector news review for 2024 in the December 2024 issue of Global Cement Magazine and a load of big important events happened afterwards. So, here is a roundup of some of the major stories that have taken place in the last two months of the year.

The TL:DR (too long; didn't read) version of ‘Global Cement News in 2024’ was: focus on the US market by the multinationals; cement joining the emissions trading scheme in China as the world’s largest market stagnates; continued rivalry between UltraTech Cement and Adani Group in India as that sector grows; markets in the Middle East and North Africa adjusting to higher exports; the drawn out divestment of InterCement in Brazil; lots of new plants in Sub-Saharan Africa reflecting demographic trends; and an emphasis on construction and demolition materials in Europe but one on aggregates in North America.

However, from November 2024 onwards… Donald Trump was re-elected as President in the US, Quikrete put in an US$11.5bn deal to buy Summit Materials, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Azerbaijan ended in acrimony, Gautam Adani was accused of fraud by a US court and Huaxin Cement said it was buying Holcim’s majority stake in Lafarge Africa for US$1bn. These have all been covered in previous editions of Global Cement Weekly. Check them out for more information. One can tell it’s been a busy tail-end to the year though when a US$600m agreement by Heidelberg Materials North America to buy Giant Cement Holding did not make the top five, admittedly selective, noteworthy news stories of the last two months of 2024. These stories also, roughly, followed the trends highlighted in the ‘Global Cement News in 2024’ article.

To reflect on the Adani story a few weeks later, nothing much seems to have occurred. Yet. The share price of various Adani Group companies fell when the US authorities made the announcement in late November 2024 but they have mostly regained much of their value since then. The consensus by Reuters, this week, was that the US prosecutors have a strong case backed up by documentation but extradition seems unlikely. Adani himself has made public appearances in India since the allegations surfaced. One minor consequence has been that Gautam Adani exited the US$100bn Bloomberg Billionaires Index in 2024. This is likely to have been caused, in part at least, by the allegations from Hindenburg Research in 2023 and the current legal problems from the US bringing down share prices. On the cement side of Adani Group it appears to have been business as usual so far. A large-scale investment in Rajasthan was announced in December 2024 and, this week, plans to merge subsidiaries Sanghi Industries and Penna Cement with Ambuja Cements were disclosed.

Another general trend that we haven’t covered much online have been changes in the Australian market. Last week, Cement Australia, a joint venture between Heidelberg Materials Australia and Holcim Australia, said it was acquiring the cementitious division of the Buckeridge Group of Companies (BGC) for US$800m. This follows CRH’s purchase of a majority stake in AdBri that was approved by the latter’s shareholders over the summer. Around the same time, Seven Group Holdings completed its acquisition of the remaining 28% stake in Boral that it did not already own. For more on the situation in Australia and New Zealand read the article in the January 2025 issue of Global Cement Magazine.

That’s it for 2024. Unless another massive news story in the cement sector gets announced in the next week-and-a-half.

Global Cement Weekly will return on Wednesday 8 January 2025

Suvo Strategic Minerals said this week that it had made moves towards establishing a joint-venture between a subsidiary and the Huadi Bantaeng Industry Park (HBIP). The plan is to manufacture and sell low-carbon cement and concrete products that contain nickel slag and other byproducts. This news story is noteworthy because of the location of HBIP in South Sulawesi, Indonesia.

In a release to the Australian Securities Exchange Suvo explained that HBIP is the managing company of the Bantaeng Industrial Park, where ‘significant’ quantities of nickel slag are stockpiled as part of the local nickel pig iron operations. HBIP will supply the nickel slag to the joint-venture. It will also give it access to infrastructure such as land, port facilities and utilities. Suvo subsidiary Climate Tech Cement, for its part, will supply the low carbon cement and or concrete mixtures and/or formulations. This follows the signing of a memorandum of understanding in September 2024, in which the companies agreed to process the nickel slag into geopolymer cement and precast concrete materials.

At first glance Indonesia seems like an unlikely place to market a low-carbon cement or concrete product, given the large cement production overcapacity in the country. The Indonesian Cement Association (ASI) reported a production capacity of just under 120Mt/yr in 2024 and forecast a utilisation rate of 57% in November 2024. However, the government seems serious about reaching net zero by 2060 as the country’s economy develops. The ASI updated its decarbonisation roadmap in 2024 and the draft is currently under review with the Ministry of Industry and consultants from the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB).

In the latest roadmap, carbon capture is at least a decade away, with the first large-scale capture tentatively anticipated from 2035 onwards. Although Indonesia launched its carbon trading scheme in 2023, it is not expected to start affecting the industrial sector until the late 2020s. Instead, the short-to-medium term Scope 1 reduction methods include increasing the use of alternative fuels, reducing the clinker factor of cement and reducing and/or optimising the specific thermal energy consumption of clinker. Initiatives such as Suvo’s joint-venture in South Sulawesi tie into that middle strand. Separately, over the summer of 2024 the government and producers said that they were working together to introduce and promote the use of Portland composite cement (PCC) and Portland pozzolana cement (PPC). At this time the ASI reckoned that a complete change could cut cement sector emissions by just over a quarter. In June 2024 local media also reported that ASI members were planning to supply low-carbon cement for the Nusantara capital city project to help it realise its aims as a ‘green city.’

Semen Indonesia, the country’s largest producer, reported a clinker factor of 69% in 2023 for all of its cement products, down from 71% in 2021. Limestone was the biggest substitute followed by trass and gypsum. It is currently aiming for a clinker factor of 61% by 2030. In its Sustainability Report for 2023 it said that it was promoting the use of non-OPC (Ordinary Portland Cement) cement “...according to the needs of construction applications.” It added that non-OPC products also had a “...5 - 15% more economical price.” However, the company has not said how its current sales are split between OPC and other products.

One of the surprises at the 26th Technical Symposium & Exhibition of the ASEAN Federation of Cement Manufacturers (AFCM), that took place in Kuala Lumpur in November 2024, was the sheer amount of work that has been going on outside of Europe and North America towards decarbonising building materials. The cement associations of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand all presented progress and targets towards this aim at the event. Suvo Strategic Minerals’ joint-venture plans in South Sulawesi are another example of this trend.

Closing points to note about the Suvo project are firstly that it is away from Indonesia’s main cement production area in Java. Secondly, the presumption is that the low-carbon cement and concrete products manufactured by the project will either be cheaper than the competition or benefit from green procurement rules. Finally, nickel slag reserves seem insufficient to reshape the entire national cement market. Yet a general move towards using more supplementary cementitious materials could. Watch this space for more developments.

Read a review of the 26th Technical Symposium & Exhibition of the ASEAN Federation of Cement Manufacturers (AFCM) in the forthcoming January 2024 issue of Global Cement Magazine