Displaying items by tag: Brazil

Spain: The European Union of Aggregates Producers has granted two Sustainable Development Awards to Brazil’s Votorantim Cimentos for its El Toril quarry restoration plan and cave conservation plan for the Cova Eirós mine, which provided raw materials for clinker produciton at its 0.7Mt/yr integrated Oural plant. Votorantim Cimentos has partnered with the University of Santiago de Compostela to facilitate archaeological study of Cova Eirós, where 50,000-year-old findings have been made. Meanwhile at El Toril, the pit will be filled, levelled and enhanced for fertility so that it may resume its previous use as arable land.

Brazil: Markets in Brazil and North America have supported Votorantim Cimentos’ sales so far in 2019, despite setbacks in Turkey and Latin America. Its sales revenue rose by 2% year-on-year to US$907m in the first nine months of 2019 from US$891m in the same period in 2018. Overall sales volumes of cement fell slightly to 8.4Mt. The cement producer’s adjusted earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) decreased by 5% to US$188m from US$199m, with declines reported in all operation regions except North America.

Brazil: Itaci Cement has purchased 100 hectares of land in Tabuleiro do Norte in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Ceará. Diario do Nordeste has reported that the company has invested US$66m in a development, though whether this will take the form of a clinker grinding or integrated cement plant has not been disclosed. Companhia Siderúrgica do Pecém (CSP) will reportedly supply granulated blast furnace slag to the facility when operational for use as a feedstock.

SNIC, the Brazilian national cement industry union, was being cautious this week but signs of improvement were there. Its cement sales data showed a 3% year-on-year rise to 40.5Mt for the first nine months of 2019 from 39.4Mt in the same period in 2018. SNIC President Paulo Camillo Penna was keen to pour cold water over the figures with a reminder that the truck driver’s strike and an economic slowdown in 2018 had unnaturally depressed industry sales. He didn’t want to ruin the party too much though. Comments followed about a National Confederation of Industry (CNI) survey forecasting growth for the next six months and market research supporting growing residential construction.

Graph 1: Cement sales in Brazil for Q1 – 3, 2014 – 2019. Source: SNIC.

As Graph 1 above shows the local industry has been through the wringer in recent years. Cement sales peaked in 2014 before the national economy was hit by falling commodity and oil prices that contributed to a recession as well as the Petrobras political crisis. At the start of 2017 Camillo Penna described the situation as the worst in the industry’s history. From the peak to the trough cement sales plummeted by 27%.

Camillo Penna’s caution now may have something to do with his previous prediction that the industry was going to recover from the second half of 2018. The sales may not have perked up but merger and acquisition activity did, with the European multinationals Buzzi Unicem and Vicat buying stakes in BCPAR (Grupo Ricardo Brennand) and Cimento Planalto (Ciplan) respectively. So far in 2019 it has been quietly optimistic but not without the odd hiccup. There have been a few new plant project announcements from Brennand Group, Votorantim and CSN Cimentos. Yet, InterCement converted its integrated Pedro Leopoldo plant in Minas Gerais to a terminal. Cimento Tupi reportedly ran into trouble with its investors when it tried to merge with its parent company following defaulting on loan payments in 2018. Notably, the country’s two cement associations also released a Cement Technology Roadmap to 2050 in April 2019. It plans to reduce specific CO2 emissions by over 30% from 2014 to 375kg CO2/t of cement in 2050 amongst other ambitions.

On the corporate side, Votorantim’s domestic sales rose by 3% year-on-year to US$771m in the first half of 2019 from US$745m in the same period in 2018. It attributed the growth to improved prices. Other news of note included the acquisition of a mortar plant in Belém, Pará state and plans to upgrade its clinker grinding unit at Pecém in Ceará. InterCement’s cement and clinker sales volumes rose by 6.8% to 4.04Mt from 3.78Mt. It declared that this was way ahead of the industry average of 1.5%. Sales revenue fell slightly, possibly due to high production overcapacity and competition on prices. Earnings were also reported as having improved in the second quarter partly due to a ‘significant’ reduction in its cost structure.

On the supplier side, refractory manufacturer RHI Magnesita reported that its margin recovery was ‘going quite well’ in Brazil during the first half of 2019. Stefan Borgas, RHI Magnesita’s chief executive officer (CEO) forecast that the margin in that country would help drive its business in the second half of 2019 and that the business was returning to the global average. RHI Magnesita also announced a Euro57.1m upgrade to its plant at Contagem, Belo Horizonte in Minas Gerais this week, including building a new regional headquarters for its South American business.

Everything seems to be coming together slowly for Brazil’s cement industry. Yet Camillo Penna and SNIC are right to be careful for another reason. The United Nations (UN) and various analysts are warning about the growing risk of global recession in 2020 based on indicators like the US yield curve. This could be especially devastating for an economy like Brazil’s that is heavily dependent on commodity markets. History may not repeat itself but the strength of that recovery may be tested sooner than anyone would like.

Brazil: RHI Magnesita is planning a Euro57.1m upgrade to its Contagem complex in Minas Gerais, to include a new plant and 15,000m² of office space. Francisco Carrara, president of RHI Magnesita South America, emphasised the importance of the Brazilian cement sector to the company, with operations in the country “representing 75% of Magnesita’s activities on the continent.”

Brazil: Paulo Camillo Penna, the president of SNIC, the Brazilian national cement industry union, has expressed caution about growing cement sales so far in 2019. Data from SNIC shows that cement sales grew by 3% year-on-year to 40.5Mt in the first nine months of 2019 from 39.4Mt in the same period in 2018. Growth was driven by central and southern regions of the country, particularly in São Paulo. Exports grew by 22% to 90,000t from 74,000t. However, Paulo Camillo said that apparent growth in 2019 was partly due to a truckers strike in May 2018 that overly depressed the year’s sales. Despite this, he added that a survey of the construction industry released by the National Confederation of Industry (CNI) was showing slow but steady improvement.

Brazil: Votorantim Cimentos has created a business unit to manage and provide services throughout the co-processing chain of alternative materials used in cement production with a five-year investment plan of US$98m. Valor has reported that the unit, named Verdera, will offer waste disposal services to various industries. Votorantim is targeting 80% petrocoke use in future cement production, compared to 25% at present. Its 2018 production used 0.9Mt of alternative materials, corresponding to a reduction of 0.5Mt in CO2 emissions compared with conventional materials.

Brazil: A research team at the University of São Paolo (USP) has concluded a study of cement hydration and pozzolanic activity when using 10% sugarcane bagasse (SB) and bamboo leaf ash (BLA) mixture. A paper released by the team has stated that the additive lowered the calcium hydroxide and heat required for hydration, saving on costs and emissions in cement production. Both binary and ternary concretes had higher compressive strengths with than without the mineral-rich additive. The study was supported by public and private funding.

Brazil: Brazil’s National Syndicate of the Cement Industry (SNIC) has released August 2019 sales figures of 5.10Mt, up by 3.0% year-on-year from 4.95% in August 2019. This corresponds to an equal apparent consumption of cement in the country of 5.10Mt, up by 2.9% year-on-year from 4.96Mt in August 2018. Besides rising demand, SNIC points to non-repeating depressing factors acting on domestic cement capacity a year ago, including a lorry drivers’ strike.

Brazil: Repsol Sinopec Brazil, Ouro Negro and the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Centre of Science and Technology at Rio de Janiero’s Pontifical Catholic University (PUC-Rio) are working together on a through tubing logging profile tool to assess cement quality in lined wells. Arbolas has reported that, where current technologies allow only for observation of anomalies located directly around the tool, the sought-after solution will facilitate detailed recording of the integrity of the adjacent layer. Ouro Negro Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Eduardo Costa has described the proposal to incorporate its TTilt technology into the Wellrobot, yielding continuous data feedback and thus reducing well interventions. The companies say that the prospect of reliable seal integrity testing for plugging and abandonment operations on fluid-bearing formations is of enormous economic and environmental import to numerous industries.