Brazil: Brazil's competition regulator, Cade, has approved Camargo Corrêa's June 2012 purchase of a controlling stake in the Portuguese cement maker Cimpor subject to several conditions. The main requirement is that Votorantim, a competitor of Camargo in the Brazilian cement market, must sell its own stake in Cimpor. Votorantim and Camargo Correa both bought shares in Cimpor in 2010.

The Cade decision is expected to result in an agreement between Camargo and Votorantim whereby Camargo gets Cimpor assets in Brazil and Votorantim gets Cimpor assets abroad including those in Spain, Turkey, China and India.

With 40% of Brazil's cement market, Votorantim is Brazil's largest cement maker. Through their shareholdings in Cimpor, both Camargo and Votorantim previously increased their share of Brazil's market. Cade also said that Camargo must sell some assets in Brazil's São Paulo state, the country's most populous and industrially-developed region, and create a technological development programme.

Under the terms of the Cade decision, Votorantim's exit from Cimpor will be carried out either by selling its Cimpor stock back to France's Lafarge or by a sale to a third party, according to Alessandro Octaviani Luis, the Cade board member who wrote the decision. "We take Votorantim's willingness to negotiate its departure from Cimpor as a symbol of goodwill to Cade," said Vinicius de Carvalho, Cade's president.

Luis had recommended rejecting the initial Votorantim purchase of Cimpor on the grounds that it would raise Votorantim's dominance of Brazil's cement market, saying that while it has less than half of Brazil's total market, in some states, Votorantim's market share is as high as 70%. "In the cement market, Votorantim does not have the means to grow through acquisitions," he said. Votorantim said later in a statement that it bought its Cimpor stake to expand internationally and it was never its intention to remain a partner in Cimpor with Camargo.

The Cade decision comes as two decades of consolidation in Brazil's cement and concrete markets have led to limited competition and kept prices high. The market conditions have created problems for a government seeking to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in road, port and housing construction and for companies expanding mines, farms, factories and transport infrastructure to supply soaring Asian demand for commodities.