Analysis

This week Aliko Dangote retired as the chair of Dangote Cement. It’s a big deal, as Dangote founded parent company Dangote Industries in 1981 as an importer of bagged cement and other commodities such as rice, sugar, flour and salt. Over 40 years later Dangote Cement is the biggest cement company in Africa with a reported capacity of 52Mt/yr, operations in at least 10 countries and annual revenues of US$2.3bn. Dangote personally has also become Africa’s richest inhabitant along the way. It’s an extraordinary achievement.

As CEO Arvind Pathak, said in the company’s half-year report, “We celebrate our president, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, who now steps down from the board, for his pivotal and transformative role in shaping the company’s growth, success, and lasting legacy. His visionary leadership, entrepreneurial spirit, and unwavering commitment laid the very foundation of our journey. Under his guidance, the company achieved remarkable milestones, expanded its footprint, and set new standards of excellence across the industry.” Dangote is aged 68 years and his successor as chair of Dangote Cement, Emmanuel Ikazoboh, is aged 76 years.

The key acquisitions started in 2000, when the company purchased a controlling stake in Benue Cement following its privatisation. Then, in 2002, it bought Obajana Cement and started up its first production line at the site by 2007. Obajana has since become the group’s largest plant in Nigeria with a production capacity of 16.3Mt/yr across four lines. The company listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange in 2010. Dangote Cement set up other plants in Nigeria and the Cement Manufacturing Association of Nigeria (CMAN) declared that the country was ‘self-sufficient’ in cement in 2012. Dangote the cement importer had become Dangote the cement producer. Then it became Dangote the cement exporter when it established its first overseas cement terminal in Ghana in 2011. Finally, it became Dangote the cement multinational when production plants outside of Nigeria started to be built in the early 2000s with units in Senegal and South Africa starting up in 2014. Today, in 2025, Dangote Cement has operations in Cameroon, Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia.

Naturally, one doesn’t build a conglomerate as large and successful as Dangote Industries without dividing opinion along the way. Issues on the cement side of the business include criticism of how Dangote managed to beat his rivals to buy government-run cement companies in the early 2000s. To be fair to Dangote though, other companies including Blue Circle and HeidelbergCement did the same thing at this time. Arguments about this issue resurfaced publicly in 2022 when the Kogi State Government took Dangote Cement to court over its ownership of the Obajana plant in relation to tax revenue.

Another issue in Nigeria in recent years has been repeated arguments about the price of cement. Despite the country becoming ‘self-sufficient’ in cement, the cost has prompted scrutiny by legislators. Meanwhile, Dangote Cement has continued to make handsome profits year after year. Outside of Nigeria, Dangote’s expansion plans haven’t always gone smoothly. Its plans to open a plant in Kenya, for example, appear to have been stymied repeatedly. Infamously, Dangote himself allegedly described Kenya as being more corrupt than Nigeria to Kenyan media. A long heralded listing on the London Stock Exchange never happened and acquisitions outside of Africa are yet to occur. Looking forward, future challenges include newer entrants into the Sub-Saharan African cement such as those from China. A sign of challenges to come include the pending acquisition of Lafarge Africa by Huaxin Cement as China continues to attempt to export its cement production ambitions.

As Aliko Dangote steps down as chair from his cement business, the potential for both his company and the continent it is based in remains high. Demographic factors favour economic growth in Africa in the 21st Century due to its growing population and need for development. This will require plenty of cement and Dangote Cement is well positioned to supply it.

And finally… some people take up gardening in their retirement. Should Dangote become bored in his retirement from the cement business though he could consider the example of the former CEO of Ireland-based CRH. It was announced last week that Albert Manifold has been appointed as the chair of oil and gas company BP. Dangote Group already operates an oil refinery. Perhaps future opportunities beckon.

Cement consumption data for the first half of 2025 from Russia has been released this week and it is down from 2024. Added to this, Cemros announced earlier in July 2025 that it is preparing to suspend production at its Belgorod cement plant. What can these and other news stories tell us about the state of the Russian cement sector at present?

Graph 1: Cement consumption in Russia, 2019 - H1 2025. Source: Soyuzcement.

Figures from Soyuzcement, the Union of Cement Producers, in the local press reports that consumption fell by 8.6% year-on-year to 27.2Mt in the first half of 2025 from 28.4Mt in the same period in 2024. By region the largest declines were noted in the south (-14%), the Urals (-13%) and in Siberia (-11%). Producer Sibcem released some production data for the first half, also this week, and this reflected the national picture, with a 9% fall.

The national situation has been blamed on a suspension of infrastructure projects, a fall in the domestic building sector and mounting imports. Imports rose by 5.8% to 1.9Mt. Notably those trade flows have been coming in from other countries with restricted access to international markets such as Belarus and Iran. A China-based company Jinyu Jidong Cement in the far-eastern Heilongjiang Province also started exporting cement to Russia in July 2025. Unusually though, for these kinds of stories, exports from Russia have also risen. They grew by 9% to 0.5Mt, mainly to Kazakhstan. The general picture fits with Soyuzcement’s updated forecast for the local market from 2025 to 2027. It expects a decline of 6 - 12% in 2025 as a whole, followed by a change of -6% to +1% in 2026 and then the start of a recovery in 2027 under most scenarios.

One reaction to the shrinking market became apparent earlier in July 2025 when Cemros said it was preparing to suspend production at its Belgorod cement plant. The company plans to use the stoppage to assess the market, reduce its operating costs and consider market diversification options. It blamed the decision on a decrease in demand in the domestic market in Russia along with lower profits and higher imports. Back in May 2025, Cemros, the leading Russia-based cement producer, said that it had 18 plants, a total production capacity of 33Mt/yr and a 31% share of the local market. It also reported that it had two mothballed plants: the Savinsky cement plant in Arkhangelsk and the Zhigulovskiye plant in the Samara region. Although, to be fair to Cemros, up until fairly recently it had been spending money on its plants. It resumed clinker production in mid-2024 when it restarted one production line at its Ulyanovsk plant in mid-2024. Then in May 2025 it said it was getting ready to restart the second line at the site too as part of a €8m renovation project. Once back online the unit will have a total production capacity of 0.8Mt/yr. Another recent plant project by Cemros was the upgrade of a kiln at Katavsky Cement that was completed in June 2025. Elsewhere, Kavkazcement was reportedly planning to invest US$224m on equipment upgrades in April 2025 in response to a large rise in production costs in 2024.

The larger problem facing the Russian construction industry and the building material producers that supply it is the ongoing economic fallout from the war in Ukraine. The head of the country’s national bank said at the start of July 2025 that the nation had broadly adapted to economic sanctions and that inflation was slowing down. Growing cement demand since 2021 broadly supports this view. Yet, governor Elvira Nabiullina warned of further market turmoil ahead due to a slowing economy and high labour costs. This spells uncertainty for the cement sector as underlined by Soyuzcement’s gloomy forecasts for 2025 and 2026. In this kind of environment market mergers and acquisitions seem likely but international sanctions may limit the options. One general remedy the government has been advocating for has been the formation of a common commodities exchange for the Eurasian Economic Union that was suggested in late 2024. However, Soyuzcement has been lobbying against the proposal on the grounds of price volatility, increased competition and a reluctance by producers to join it. The cement sector in Russia faces challenging times ahead.

Holcim Mexico has been promoting itself as the lynchpin of the group’s growth in Latin America this week. The move makes sense following the spin-off of Holcim’s North America business in late June 2025. The company says that Mexico has a housing deficit, has the highest profitability margin in Latin America and it is leading the transformation toward circular and low-carbon construction.

The bullseye on Latin America was first planted by Holcim in the group’s NextGen Growth 2030 strategy that was released in March 2025. With the company preparing to separate off its most profitable section in the US, it decided to highlight new reasons for investors to stay interested. The summary was ‘focused investment’ in attractive markets in Latin America, Europe, North Africa and Australia, sustainability-driven growth with demolition materials singled out and an emphasis on the building solutions division. Although the Latin America division supplied the smallest geographical share of new group net sales in 2024 (US$3.9bn, 19%), the profitability metric presented, recurring earnings before interest and taxation (EBIT) margin, gave the region the highest result. Or in other words, Holcim is telling investors that it may have divested North America but it still has business south of the Rio Grande… and it looks promising. It then said that it has the ‘best’ geographical coverage and vertical integration in the region and the largest construction materials retail franchise in the form of Disensa.

Understandably, the likes of Cemex, Cementos Argos, Votorantim and others might take exception to some of this. For example, Cemex reported net sales in excess of US$6bn in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Votorantim reported net sales of around US$4.8bn in 2024. Yet, Holcim’s claim of regional spread does carry some weight. It purchased Comacsa and Mixercon in Peru and assets from Cemex in Guatemala in 2024. At the end of the year the group owned integrated cement plants in Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru. Plus it held grinding plants in the French Antilles and Nicaragua. All of these are majority-owned subsidiaries, often also with aggregate, ready-mixed concrete and building systems businesses. Holcim may have sold up in Brazil in 2022 but it still holds a relatively intact network in Latin America.

Graph 1: Grey cement production in Mexico, 2020 - April 2025, rolling 12 months. Source: National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).

As for the market, Holcim reported modest but growing net sales in Latin America in 2024, despite lower sales volumes plus elections in Mexico, economic issues in Argentina and political instability in Ecuador. Focusing on Mexico, local cement volumes were said to be stable, aided by a recovery in bagged cement in spite of bulk sales falling on the back of fewer infrastructure projects. Holcim Mexico also spent US$55m on building a new grinding unit at its integrated Macuspana plant in Tabasco. Once complete, the update will increase the site’s capacity by 0.5Mt/yr to 1.5Mt/yr.

Cemex, the market leader in Mexico, released more direct information. It saw its sales and operating earnings fall in 2024. This was blamed on a poor second half to the year following the presidential election in June 2024. GCC’s sales fell more sharply in 2024 and this was blamed on “energy infrastructure limitations and permitting delays in Juarez.” So far in 2025, in the first quarter, the pain in Mexico for the construction sector has continued, with both Cemex and GCC noting strong falls in cement volumes and sales due to a slowdown in industrial demand. Holcim has not reported on Mexico directly so far in 2025 only saying that sales have risen in local currencies in Latin America as a whole in the first quarter. Cemex started a cost cutting exercise in February 2025 in response to the situation. Graph 1 above shows Mexican cement production. Although it should be noted that Cemex and GCC still run subsidiaries in the US. Holcim now does not. Rolling 12-month cement production figures in Mexico started falling in September 2024 and continued to do so until April 2025, the date of the latest data provided by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography.

Despite falling volumes though, the price of cement in Mexico remains high by international standards. At the start of July 2025 the National Association of Independent Businessmen (ANEI) raised the alarm that distributors had warned of an 8% price rise on the way. It’s in this environment that news stories such as Bolivia-based Empresa Pública de Cementos Bolivia (ECEBOL), a producer in a landlocked and mountainous country, preparing to export clinker to Mexico from July 2025 start to sound credible. Sales may have been down in Mexico in 2024 but earnings and margins remain high. In the medium-to-longer term the country looks even more promising, with plenty of scope for development and building products. Ditto the rest of Latin America.

One way a multinational heavy building materials company with a presence in sustainability-obsessed Europe might gain an advantage in the region is by using its knowledge to capture the easier decarbonisation routes first. This is exactly the route Holcim and Holcim Mexico seem to be taking by promoting lower carbon cement and concrete products, and by growing the recycling of demolition materials. Another option, of course, is that Holcim is bolstering its Latin America division ahead of a potential divestment. Either way, Holcim is presenting a plan for growth in its new form, shorn of North America. It’s all to play for.

Titan Group announced this week that it will build a processing and beneficiating unit for fly ash at Warrington in the UK. The move marks both a trend in fly ash projects in the UK recently and Titan’s own focus in the country.

Titan has struck a deal to use ponded fly ash at the former Fiddler’s Ferry power station in the North-West of England. It aims to process 300,000t/yr of wet fly ash from 2027 onwards with the option to double this capacity if desired. The processed fly ash will meet the BS EN 450 standard for subsequent use in cement or concrete. Crucially, Titan intends to use the technology of its subsidiary, ST Equipment & Technology (STET). This company has a proprietary dry electrostatic process that it uses for fly ash beneficiation. Titan acquired STET in 2002. It says its process is being used at 12 power stations in the US, Canada, the UK, Poland, and South Korea. The project at Fiddler’s Ferry will be the 20th fly ash project developed with STET technology.

Titan has not commented on the specifics of its arrangement with site-owner PEEL Group other than to describe it as a ‘long-term agreement.’ It currently operates a terminal in Hull, on the other side of the country, 160km from Warrington. As for Fiddler’s Ferry, the coal-fired power plant closed in 2020. Prior to this though RockTron Group built a 800,000t/yr unit at Fiddler’s Ferry to process both ‘fresh’ and stockpiled fly ash in the late 2000s. Unfortunately the company entered administration in 2013. Later, Power Minerals was reportedly selling fly ash from the plant at the time that its closure was announced in 2019. A report commissioned by consultants Arcadis for the local council reported that ash including pulverised fuel ash (PFA) was present in the lagoons at the site.

Other companies have also been looking at the fly ash market in the UK. Invicta, a joint venture between Türkiye-based Medcem and Brett Group opened a terminal at Sheerness in Kent in 2024 to import PFA and cement. In April 2025 a ship unloader supplied by Van Aalst was delivered to the port. Then in May 2025 it was announced that Mecem is planning to build a terminal in Liverpool to import cement and supplementary cementitious materials (SCM), such as fly ash and granulated blast furnace slag. The terminal will have a combined storage capacity of 45,000t in four silos in its initial phase and is scheduled for completion in mid-2026. Meanwhile, the Drax power station said in March 2025 that it had signed a 20-year joint venture agreement with Power Minerals to process legacy PFA. A unit at the now biomass power plant in Yorkshire is scheduled to start by the end of 2026 with an initial production capacity of 400,000t/yr.

The background to this interest in fly ash in the UK appears to be a local cement sector struggling with high energy costs and low capacity-utilisation rates. Reports in local media in late June 2025 cited preliminary estimates that cement output may have reached an ‘all-time low’ in 2024. High electricity prices were blamed for the situation by the Mineral Products Association (MPA) and it warned of mounting imports from the EU and North Africa. All of this was timed to coincide with a release of a new Industrial Strategy by the UK government. For more on the UK cement sector in general see Global Cement Weekly in May 2025 and Edwin Trout’s feature in the June 2025 issue of Global Cement Magazine.

Readers will be aware of the growing attractiveness of SCMs for cement and concrete production for both cutting costs and meeting sustainability goals. A report by McKinsey on SCMs for the cement sector in late 2024 forecast that SCMs and fillers in Europe could represent an emerging value pool that could reach €8 – 10bn in 2035 as the price of cement steadily rises. The SCMs being used are likely to change as sources of industrial SCMs such as slag and ash dwindle and others such as clays, pozzolans or limestone become more available. The UK may have closed its last coal-powered power plant in 2024 but ash from ponds can still be reclaimed or ash can be imported if the economics makes sense. Recent investments by Titan, Medcem and Power Minerals suggest that the price is indeed right. The interest of two major cement exporting companies amongst the three names above also indicates changing market dynamics. Expect more of these kinds of deals and investments in the UK, Europe and elsewhere in coming years.

It’s been a busy period at FLSmidth in Denmark with the announced sale of its Air Pollution Control business this week. This has followed the divestment of its cement business and its headquarters in Valby in late June 2025.

The Denmark-based company has moved towards mining over the last decade. In the mid-2010s, revenue from its cement business was higher than its mining division. This started to change in 2017 when it acquired part of Sandvik Mining Systems. The purchase of ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions’ mining business followed in 2021. The focus on mining then became more overt with the announcement of so-called “pure play strategies” for its mining and cement divisions in 2023. The public decision to sell the cement business came in early 2024. That year the cement division contributed about one fifth of group order intake, revenue and earnings. For more on the background to the decision to divest read Global Cement Weekly’s commentary in January 2024.

US-based private equity company Pacific Avenue Capital Partners was revealed as the buyer for the cement division on 20 June 2025. The value of the deal was presented as a total initial consideration of €75m and a further conditional deferred cash consideration of up to €75m. This latter payment appears to be based on undisclosed criteria. The cement division reported revenue of €596m and adjusted earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of €54m in 2024. The divestment is expected to close in the second half of 2025 subject to the regulatory approval and so on.

However, other sales connected to FLSmidth’s cement business have also been occurring. A deal to sell its Non-Core Activities segment to KOCH Solutions was announced in June 2023. This includes a mixture of intellectual property for port and terminal equipment, stockyard systems and pipe conveyors. It also covers order backlog, employees and facilities. No purchase price has been revealed. Completion was originally planned for the end of 2024 but it has been put back to the end of 2025. In July 2023 the sale of its Advanced Filtration Technologies (AFT) filter media business to Micronics was declared. No price for the divestment was disclosed but a net gain of around €13m was reported in the company’s annual report.

Jump forward to 2024 and the divestment of MAAG gears and drives was swiftly announced and then completed in the first quarter to Sweden-based investment company Solix Group. As before no price was publicised but a net gain of around €3.75m was reported. Now, in 2025, the group signed a deal to sell its headquarters at Valby in Denmark for around €98m. The company has been based in the town since 1899 and the building in question at Vigerslev Allé was inaugurated in 1956. The company is planning to move to a new headquarters in Copenhagen later in 2025. This week the sale of its Air Pollution Control business to UK-based investors Rubicon Partners has been announced. It said that since 2020 the company has gradually been divesting businesses related to air pollution control. This latest sale is the last part of that process.

So that appears to be it for FLSmidth’s involvement in the cement sector beyond the quarry gates. The divestments have occurred in a piecemeal fashion rather than one single outright transaction. The Non-Core Activities and Advanced Filtration Technologies (AFT) segments are being sold to manufacturers. By contrast MAAG gears and drives, the Air Pollution Control business and the remainder of the cement business are being sold to investment companies. We’ll have to wait a few years to work out the implications of all of this.