Half-year financial results from some of the major cement producers outside of China show a general positive trend in 2026 to-date. The North American market is still delivering for these companies but the focus on growth for some has shifted to aggregates. Elsewhere in the world, in developing markets, the effects of geopolitical events in the Middle East are having an effect on balance sheets. Read on for our round-up.

Figure 1: Sales of selected major multinational cement producers in first half of 2026. Source: Company financial reports. Note: Figures calculated for Indian companies.

CRH’s sales in the first half of 2026 benefited from its acquisition of Eco Material Technologies in 2025 and higher prices for aggregates. Cement sales volumes in its Americas Materials Solutions division grew but pricing slowed. Both cement volumes and prices increased in the group’s international division outside of North America. Sales volumes of aggregates were high (above 5%) everywhere. CEO Jim Mintern pointedly described the company as the “leading aggregates and critical infrastructure player in North America” in the second quarter results in connection to the June 2025 announcement that it is buying Arcosa for US$8.5bn.

Heidelberg Materials’ sales revenue from cement fell slightly in most regions with the exception of North America. Sales of aggregates, ready-mixed concrete and asphalt rose. In Europe, the group’s largest area, it said that for cement “construction activity remains subdued as a result of higher interest rates, a decline in real purchasing power and a significant rise in construction costs.” Cement and clinker volumes in North America grew modestly with a significant increase in the Midwest US and a moderate decline in the Northwest region. Cement and clinker volumes in the group’s Africa-Mediterranean-Western Asia group area fell slightly and this was attributed to poor market conditions in certain countries. Volumes did rise in Türkiye, where the company increased its stake in subsidiary Akçansa to 79% from 40% in June 2026.

Holcim reported organic growth of 5% year-on-year in the first half of 2026. However, like-for-like sales barely rose. This was due to the divestment of Amrize in June 2025. The acquisitions of Cementos Pacasmayo and Xella in the first half of 2026 were insufficient to compensate much so far. Encouragingly, much of that organic growth came from the sale of building materials. The group’s largest geographic area by revenue, Europe, reported sales driven by markets in Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Greece and East Europe, with help from its acquisition of precast concrete producer Alkern in January 2026. Its Asia, Middle East & Africa segment was noticeably smaller in the first half of 2026 due to the sale of Lafarge Africa in mid-2025. 

Cemex enjoyed a strong first half with sales, earnings and cement volumes driven by good performance in Mexico. It attributed this to rising demand, cost cutting and a “pricing strategy designed to offset input cost inflation." Sales were up elsewhere but earnings fell in the US. This was blamed on rising material and freight costs, as well as bad weather in Texas. In Europe the group singled out promising cement sales volumes in Spain and the Czech Republic. It also said that the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), along with the reduction in allowances, “have been and should continue to be supportive of higher prices.”

Of the other companies covered, UltraTech Cement reported sales growth of 16% year-on-year to US$2.57bn in the first quarter of its 2027 financial year (to 30 June 2026). It noted that it had turned a net loss for its acquisition of The India Cements in the corresponding quarter in 2025 to a profit in the current one, demonstrating its “ability to rapidly stabilise, integrate and improve acquired assets.” Its cement sales volumes were up by 13% to 39.2Mt with a capacity utilisation rate of 81% from a local production capacity of around 200Mt/yr. The news it didn’t share so readily was that its costs grew by 16% in the most recent quarter compared to 8% last year. By contrast, Adani Cement’s main subsidiary Ambuja Cements did point out the effects of higher imported fuel costs, including petcoke and thermal coal, and logistics costs originating from “geopolitical developments in West Asia.” Both its sales volumes of cement and revenues fell in the first quarter of the 2027 financial year. It further warned of peak fuel cost inflation in the second quarter. The company aims to fight this with cost cutting and efficiency savings.

Finally, Dangote Cement delivered a robust result in the first half of 2026 with its international markets rebounding. Inflation may have picked up at home in Nigeria but the company still managed to increase its sales volumes of cement by 8% to 9.7Mt. Volumes and revenue jumped up elsewhere but earnings were flat. The company also noted that exports of cement from Nigeria rose by 62% to 1.1Mt. It will be interesting to see whether this once more becomes an issue for Dangote Cement should the price of cement in Nigeria be deemed too high again in the court of public opinion.

That’s it for this selective view on the first half of 2026. We will follow this up in the coming weeks with a review of the situation in China.

This week the European Commission (EC) announced its latest plan to change the emissions trading scheme (ETS). Meanwhile, in New Zealand, the government gave Fletcher Building around US$35m to keep its Golden Bay Cement Northland plant open. Read on to find out how the two stories are linked.

Following pressure from European heads of state earlier in the year, the EC published its proposal to amend the scheme. The commission has presented it as an Electrification Action Plan and an ETS review. However, the latter proposal is the main concern for the cement sector in the short term. It wants to add more free permits and slow the rate at which they are phased out. The Linear Reduction Factor (LRF) will be reduced to 3.7% for 2031 - 2035 and 1.7% for 2036 - 2040. This compares to the current LRF of 4.3% and the next one of 4.4% for 2028 - 2030. Both the amount of free permits or allowances for carbon credits and the rate at which they are phased out are a major concern for heavy emitting sectors, like cement, because it exposes them to the carbon price faster. The commission has spun this slowdown in its ambitions for the ETS as aligning it with the “domestic climate ambition level.”

Naturally, these changes come with strings attached. Free permits will be given to industry for longer but on the condition that investment is made towards decarbonisation. 80% of the value of the free permits will be given in advance but the remaining 20% will only follow once decarbonisation plans have been verified. Likewise, the free permit system will continue to operate to and the full version of the Cross Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) will start from 2038, instead of 2034 previously.

Cement Europe welcomed the proposed changes, noting that they were an “acknowledgement of the need to maintain sufficient liquidity in the carbon market beyond 2040.” It also liked the inclusion of CO₂ transport infrastructure within the definition of ETS ‘installation.’ However, it did not like the slower phase out of the free allowances for CBAM sectors, as it is seeking a “level playing field” for carbon costs for both imports and exports. It is also looking forward to any progress on electricity prices, noting that such prices in the European Union (EU) remained higher than those in many competing countries that produce cement and clinker.

Climate think tanks such as Sandbag were less enthusiastic. In response to the proposed changes it declared in a LinkedIn post that the reforms would torpedo the EU’s legally binding target of a net emissions reduction of 90% by 2040 from 1990 levels. Its view is that the ETS currently has a surplus of permits representing 1.7x the emissions reported in 2025. If the EU tries to meet an 85% target it runs the risk of having too many free permits and crashing the EU ETS price. Sandbag reckons, more realistically, that the most likely scenario, if the current proposals are enacted, is that the 1.7x surplus will endure to 2040 leading to a 75% reduction of total emissions. Or, in other words, the EU appears to be softening its emissions reduction targets.

All of this links to a cement plant in New Zealand because the owners, Fletcher Building, partly blamed the threat of closing the site on local carbon taxes. Following an ‘independent assessment’ the company said that it might have to close the integrated plant and import clinker instead by 2030. Instead, the government has made a “specific, one-time response to an exceptional set of circumstances” and local subsidiary Golden Bay Cement has committed to investing around US$87m and keeping the site open until at least 2040. As Fletcher Building pointed out in its accompanying press release, it supplies nearly 60% of the cement used in the country and 95% of the plant’s output is sold domestically. It is worth noting, that despite major differences between the two systems, the carbon price in New Zealand is currently around €50/t compared to around €80/t in the EU.

These kinds of situations are going to continue as carbon taxes grow and mature around the world. Schemes will be tweaked following political pressure and governments may have to decide whether they want to bail out heavy emitters that they might deem as essential to society. One absurdity of the current argument in the EU about the ETS is that the commission has now issued its response softening the system following a record-breaking heatwave.

International shipments of cement connect many nations around the world. The top five trade flows of cement and clinker generated revenues in the region of US$5bn in 2025. In the last week of July 2026, governments have successfully enacted or upheld tariffs to constrain the movement of cement, including along some major trade flows.

Our story this week begins in Quebec, Canada, where the former McInnis Cement built a new 2.2Mt/yr integrated cement plant at Port-Daniel between 2014 and June 2017. The plant is situated on the south coast of the Gaspé peninsula, facing out on the Gulf of St Lawrence, and beyond to the US east coast. It was strategically located to capture anticipated infrastructure-driven demand growth in the US, under prevailing free trade arrangements. At that time, US cement imports were forecast at 22Mt in 2018, more than doubling to 50Mt by 2028.¹

On 20 January 2017, Donald Trump first took office as US President, elected on a promise, among other things, to clear up ‘bad’ trade deals. In the first year of his presidency, the country imported 13.5Mt of cement and clinker.² Import volumes continued to grow at the anticipated rate over the next eight years, up to 25.4Mt in 2025. Over the same period, US cement consumption grew by approximately 12% to around 110Mt – hardly a bonanza. The nearest plant inside the US to Port-Daniel – Giant Cement Holding’s Thomaston plant in Maine – idled its kiln in 2025.

President Trump first enacted tariffs on goods from Canada on 4 March 2025, subject to the exemption of goods compliant with the preexisting US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Canadian cement is eligible to be USMCA-compliant, provided it contains all-North American raw materials and has the necessary paperwork to show it. On 20 February 2026, the US Supreme Court found Trump’s tariffs void, given that the President’s emergency powers did not extend to the imposition of tariffs. A blanket US ‘surcharge’ of 10%, and Canadian retaliatory tariffs, remained in place.

It was in this Canadian retaliation that President Trump found the legal basis for his next move. A never-before-used provision of the Tariff Act 1930 permits punitive tariffs of up to 50% on any goods from countries that treat US goods ‘unequally,’ as Canada now allegedly does. On 20 July 2026, a series of Presidential proclamations enacted 50% tariffs ‘to offset discrimination’ of US exports under three headings: alcohol, automobiles and dairy products. Under the second of these – alongside hundreds of other products from animal hides to ‘bones treated with acid’ – is cement.³ The new tariffs will enter force on 20 August 2026. The anticipated effects are as follows:

1 – A decline in sales for Canadian cement producers;

2 – A rise in costs for US construction firms, passing to the end customer.

The American Cement Association previously communicated its position on Trump’s tariff measures in March 2025.⁴ At time of writing, it has yet to comment on these latest developments.

The Canada-US cement trade is not one of the major global flows, but it is nonetheless instructive due to the scale of the US market, as developments might affect its larger trade partners: Türkiye and Vietnam. These industries represent significant strategic overcapacity in their respective export spheres of the Atlantic basin and Asia-Pacific.

On 23 July 2026, the Philippines government rejected importer NCL Trading’s appeal against ‘anti-dumping duties’ on Vietnamese cement, in force until 2028. It found sufficient evidence of injury to the domestic sector to maintain a tariff of up to 23% on imports. NCL Trading already pays a special reduced rate of 2%. Cement from China and Indonesia previously also became subject to the duty earlier in June 2026.

Other tariff news followed from Serbia. The landlocked country imports cement chiefly from neighbouring countries and – overland via Bulgaria – Türkiye. On 24 July 2026, the government extended a six-month quota on cement imports of 250,000t. As in the first half of the year, importers will pay 50% tariffs on shipments above quota volume. The government apportioned the quota between trade partners based on their historical volumes of cement exports to Serbia in 2020 – 2024.

New trade flows continue to open up, even as others are winding down. In the first quarter of 2026, Senegal increased its cement exports to the Gambia tenfold year-on-year, following domestic production capacity growth in Senegal in the intervening period. West African regional cement imports rose by 39% in 2025, with Eastern Mediterranean countries being the lead established providers.

There are other options available to governments seeking to prop up their domestic cement production. In New Zealand, which is 60% reliant on Fletcher Building’s Portland cement plant for its cement supply, the government granted the producer up to US$34.7m to continue production on 20 July 2026. It justified the grant based on the ‘massive exposure’ of the country to global cement supply disruptions, if not for the Portland plant. Fletcher Building said that production was becoming untenable, due in part to New Zealand’s lack of any carbon border adjustments on imports. Foreseeably, such a ‘CBAM’ mechanism may play a part in the Pacific nation’s eventual decarbonisation (due by 2050). On 22 July 2026, however, the New Zealand Climate Commission reported that the government is off track to meet its goal without immediately doubling its pace of decarbonisation.⁵

The government of Cambodia, meanwhile, extended a specific tax exemption on domestic cement producers’ sales on 24 July 2026, until the end of 2028. The Cambodian cement industry serves 80% of domestic cement needs, with consumption forecast to chart a composite annual growth rate of 7% up to 2028.

In Mozambique, Huaxin Cement subsidiary Cimentos de Moçambique successfully tripled the production capacity of its Nacala cement plant to 1.2Mt/yr on 28 July 2026, eliminating the need for 300,000t/yr of exports. The expanded plant will, in turn, increase its exports to Madagascar.

Investing in a cement plant is always risky. The lesson of the past decade’s cement news appears to be: secure your domestic market first. In the time since McInnis Cement commenced operations at Port-Daniel, China broadly withdrew from the import of cement, and the US now shows every sign of attempting to follow it. The definite stage of the EU’s CBAM began on 1 January 2026, and the bloc is encouraging its trade partners’ efforts to replicate the measures. Rolling, temporary tariffs have served in the Philippines and elsewhere. Into the medium-term future, underserved regions like West and Southern Africa remain. As Huaxin Cement’s movements in Mozambique make abundantly clear, this may not be the case for long.

References

1 Béton Provincial, Port-Daniel-Gascons Mcinnis Cement Plant, 2017, www.betonprovincial.com/en/our-projects/port-daniel-gascons-mcinnis-cement-plant/

2 US Geological Survey, ‘Cement Statistics and Information,’ February 2025, www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/cement-statistics-and-information

3 Executive Office of the President, ‘Imposing Additional Duties To Offset Canadian Discrimination Against the Commerce of the United States With Respect to Motor Vehicles,’ 23 July 2026, www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/07/23/2026-14997/imposing-additional-duties-to-offset-canadian-discrimination-against-the-commerce-of-the-united

4 American Cement Association, ‘US Cement Industry Statement on Trump Administration’s Proposed Tariffs,’ 3 February 2026, www.cement.org/2025/02/04/u-s-cement-industry-statement-on-trump-administrations-proposed-tariffs/

5 He Pou a Rangi Aotearoa, 2026 Monitoring report: Emissions reduction, 22 July 2026, www.climatecommission.govt.nz/reports-and-evidence/publications/2026-monitoring-report-emissions-reduction/

Brazil is the focus this week with the news that local sales reached 32.9Mt in the first half of 2026. The market is also facing change in its composition with the change in ownership of InterCement earlier in the year and the ongoing sale of CSN Cimentos.

Graph 1: Cement sales in Brazil, 2018 - June 2026. Source: National Cement Industry Union (SNIC)

The latest data from the National Cement Industry Union (SNIC) shows that cement sales rose by 2.3% year-on-year to 32.9Mt in the first half of 2026 from 32.1Mt in the same period in 2025. As can be seen in Graph 1 above, this is the largest first-half figure since at least 2018. There has been a general trend of sales growth in this time, from 52.8Mt in 2018 to 67Mt in 2025. 2026 as a whole looks reasonably likely to surpass this barring any market shocks. SNIC has identified the Minha Casa, Minha Vida (MCMV) house building programme as the main driver of sales. It says that it accounted for 50% of new real estate project launches in the first quarter of 2026 and created a 10% rise in sales. An expansion of the programme in April 2026 to higher income families and revised government house building targets are expected to generate an additional 5Mt of cement consumption. The union also mentioned that the increased use of rigid concrete pavement (whitetopping) road projects is likely to contribute to infrastructure-related cement sales.

Unfortunately, SNIC’s list of potential risks to the cement sector is weighty. Rising and volatile fuel costs in relation to geopolitical events are similar to the rest of the world. The local interest rate, the Selic rate, is not expected to fall as much as anticipated by the end of the year. Other local issues include a change in regulated working hours that is expected to push up labour costs when it becomes law in the second half of 2026. SNIC also flagged up the growing economic cost of online gambling upon household debt and the direct consequence of this upon the self-build sector. This issue has been part of a national debate in Brazil and stricter rules were expected to be implemented in mid-July 2026.

Clarity on the future of CSN Cimentos should start to emerge in mid-August 2026. The deadline for bids is on 7 August 2026. Then a contract might be signed in September 2026 with a potential buyer if all goes well. However, as reporting by Valor Econômico has revealed, there may be a gap between the price CSN wants for its cement division and what the potential buyers are prepared to pay. The vendor reportedly wants around US$2.5bn but potential bidders were expecting a lower price, nearer to US$2bn. This is an issue with the Chinese companies. China-based companies linked to the sale previously have included Anhui Conch, Huaxin Cement and Sinoma International. Local companies Votorantim and Polimix Concreto were linked to the sale previously but it is unknown whether they will make bids or not.

Regarding InterCement, a consortium led by LATCEM, Redwood Capital Management and Moneda Patria Investments took control in April 2026. The three companies also injected US$110m into the company during the process. In an interview in July 2026 Marcelo Mindlin, the controller of LATCEM, confirmed that the new management is preparing to divest Loma Negra. InterCement is currently the controlling shareholder of the Argentina-based cement company. He added that the consortium is still building its strategy for InterCement and working out which sections of the business offer the best return.

Finally, the government in Brazil announced preliminary plans for its carbon market in May 2026. Cement is set to be included in the first phase of the scheme that will start in 2027. The paper, ​iron and steel, aluminium, oil and gas, and air transport sectors will also be included. The scheme will include a four year preparation period where emissions monitoring is prepared, conducted and then allocations set. So, if the market continues in its proposed form, the local cement market might start facing carbon fees from 2031 onwards.

The current state of the cement market in Brazil is looking promising but it is delicate. It is understandable why CSN might be optimistic about the price it could get for selling its cement business given the sales figures so far in 2026. We’ll have to wait a few weeks to find out what the potential bidders think. The rise in cement sales may also have given the new management at InterCement an easy introduction to taking charge of the business before they have to take any tough decisions. Plans for a carbon market in Brazil mean that another major cement producing country is engaging with decarbonisation at the legislative level.