October 2025

Philippines: Germany’s ThyssenKrupp hopes to secure orders of around US$50 – 100m in 2017 due to the government’s ‘Build, Build, Build’ infrastructure development programme. It raised US$30m in the country in 2017, according to the BusinessWorld newspaper. The equipment manufacturer wants to benefit from the construction of new cement and power plants. Typically, it provides the engineering and material handling aspect of a project, while a local partner handles the construction.

US: Italy’s Cementir Holding has completed its acquisition of an additional 38.75% of Lehigh White Cement. It paid US$107m for the purchase. Following the deal Cementir holds a 63.25% stake in Lehigh White Cement and Cemex holds the remaining 36.75%. Cementir said that the acquisition would allow it to directly manage assets in the US in the core white cement business.

US: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has awarded CalPortland the 2018 Energy Star Partner of the Year Sustained Excellence Award for continued leadership and superior contributions to Energy Star. CalPortland’s accomplishments will be recognized by the EPA and the Department of Energy at a ceremony in Washington, DC on 20 April 2018.

Its key accomplishments in 2017 include: promoting energy management across the US cement industry through the chief executive officer’s leadership of a trade association and an offer of the company’s assistance to others in the industry; earning the EPA’s Energy Star plant certification for two cement plants where one was recently purchased and required extensive upgrades and energy improvements to qualify in less than two years; and continuing to invest in operations through new plant hardware such as a high efficiency separator for a mill, efficient new equipment to improve raw feed processing, and computational fluid dynamic software to better manage process air and material flows. The company also developed innovative methods for training employees and motivating them to manage energy in their work. In its outreach work it informed employees and over 106,000 community members and schools, competitors and others about energy management and the Energy Star program.

Philippines: Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez says that all imports of cement have passed quality tests since the implementation of the new Department Administrative Order (DAO) in November 2017. He said that a review of the DAO found a total of 167 cement shipments totalling 1.93Mt conducted by 32 traders and manufacturers, according to the Philippine Star newspaper. Of the 167 shipments, Lopez said 24 conducted pre-shipment tests from its source country through accredited testing laboratories. He added that the pre-shipment tests were also subject to post-shipment tests and all passed the post-shipment tests also. The review was carried out to check whether pre-shipment tests were rigorous enough.

Algeria/Niger: The Aoulef cement plant in Afrar province has started exporting cement to Niger. Youcef Yousfi, the Minister of Industry and Mines, welcomed the news in a statement, according to the El Moudjahid newspaper and the Algeria Press Service. The plant exported 950t of Ordinary Portland Cement by land. The 1.5Mt/yr Aoulef cement plant started production in December 2017. It aims to export around 1Mt/yr of cement.

India: UltraTech Cement has received approval from the Competition Commission of India (CCI) regarding its bid for Binani Cement. It said that the Committee of Creditors (COC) of Binani Cements had rated Bharat Dalmia as the leading bidder instead of UltraTech Cement because it didn’t have clearance from the CCI. “A lot of apprehensions were raised by the resolution professional about UltraTech obtaining the CCI clearance, on its bid for Binani Cements,” said UltraTech Cement in a statement.

Germany: Beumer Group has launched two start-up companies as part of its business strategy for 2018: ‘The best, not the biggest’. The new subsidiaries are intended to develop minimum viable products (MVP) or prototypes that feature minimum equipment and generate sustainable added value. Both companies are intended to use ‘advanced and disruptive’ business ideas to influence and improve existing business models.

BG.evolution is located in Dortmund near the Digital.Hub Logistics innovation centre. Researchers at this company are working on designing the logistics for digital business models in conjunction with the Technical University of Dortmund and other external specialists. BG.challenge in Berlin is intended to develop new business models that may disrupt existing business models from outside. BG.challenge also offers start-up support for young entrepreneurs.

US: HarbisonWalker International has obtained ISO 9001:2015 certification for its Thomasville monolithic and precast refractory plant in Georgia and its South Shore refractory brick plant in Kansas. The refractory manufacturer now plans to achieve the new ISO standard at the rest of its plants by the end of 2018.

Many of the Chinese cement producers have released their annual results for 2017 over the last week, giving us plenty to consider. The first takeaway is the stabilisation of cement sales since 2014. As can be seen in Graph 1, National Bureau of Statistics data shows that cement sales grew year-on-year from 2008 to 2014. This trend stopped in 2015 and then government mandated measures to control production overcapacity kicked-in such as a industry consolidation, shutting ‘obsolete’ plants and seasonal closures. Although it’s not shown here, that last measure, also known as peak shifting, cans be seen in quarterly sales data, with an 8% year-on-year fall in cement sales to 578Mt in the fourth quarter of 2017.

Graph 1: Cement sales in China, 2007 – 2017. Source: National Bureau of Statistics.

Looking at the sales revenue from the larger producers in 2017 doesn’t show a great deal except for the massive lead the two largest producers – CNBM and Anhui Conch – hold over their rivals. CNBM reported sales roughly twice as large as Anhui Conch, which in turn reported sales twice as large as China Resources Cement (CRC). With everything set for the merger between CNBM and Sinoma to complete at some point in the second quarter of 2018, that leader’s advantage can only get bigger.

Graph 2: Sales revenue of selected Chinese cement producers. Source: Company reports.

What’s more interesting here is how all of these companies are growing their sales at over 15% in a market where cement sales volumes appear to have fallen by 1.67% to 2.31Bnt in 2017. CNBM explained that its sale growth arose from improving cement prices in the wake of the government’s supply side changes. It added that national cement production fell by 3.1% to 2.34Bnt. CNBM’s annual results also suggested that the cement production capacity utilisation rate was 63% in 2017.

Anhui Conch’s results were notable for its large number of overseas projects as it followed the state’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ overseas industrial expansion strategy. Projects in Indonesia and Cambodia were finished in 2017 with production set for 2018. Further plants are in various states of development in Laos, Russia and Myanmar. The other point of interest was that Anhui Conch is developing a 50,000t CO₂ capture and purification pilot project at its Baimashan cement plant. Given the way the Chinese government has been able to direct the local industry, should it decide to promote CO₂ capture at cement plants in the way it has pushed for waste heat recovery units or co-processing, then the results could be enormous.

CRC reported its continued focus on alternative fuels. Municipal waste co-processing projects in Tianyang County, Guangxi and Midu County, Yunnan are under construction and are expected to be completed in the first half of 2018. Construction of its hazardous waste co-processing project in Changjiang, Hainan was completed in February 2018.

As ever with the Chinese cement industry, the worry is what happens once the production overcapacity kicks in. The state–published figures and state-owned cement companies suggest that the industry is in the early stages of coping with this. In February 2018 Reuters reported that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) had banned new cement production capacity in 2018. The detail here is that new capacity is allowed but that it has to follow specific rules designed to decrease capacity overall. This followed an announcement by the China Cement Association that it would eliminate 393Mt of capacity and shut down 540 cement grinding companies by 2020. The aim here is to hold capacity utilisation rates at 80% and 70% for clinker and cement respectively and to consolidate clinker and cement production within the top ten producers by 70% and 60%. If the utilisation rate from CNBM is accurate then the industry has a way to go yet.

Pakistan: Lt Gen Tariq Khan has been appointed as the chief executive and managing director of Fauji Fertilizer Company, the owner of Fauji Cement. He succeeds Lt Gen Shafqaat Ahmed.