Displaying items by tag: Dalmia Bharat

India: Dalmia Bharat has donated US$262,000 to the Odisha Chief Minister’s Relief Fund to help people survive the coronavirus outbreak and lockdown. United News of India has reported that Dalmia Bharat has participated in extensive humanitarian efforts during the on-going pan-Indian coronavirus lockdown, including delivering a week’s groceries to 650 families in the Odisha town of Rajgangpur and dry food packets to 900 families in districts around its Biswali, Odisha plant. The group has cooked meals for 3000 people and arranged with local administrators to feed a further 8800. Dalmia Bharat has also opened its technical centres, guest houses and schools to medical authorities for use in treating coronavirus cases. Dalmia Bharat East regional manufacturing head Sunil Gupta said, “We are totally committed to supporting the national and state governments in their fight to contain the spread of COVID-19.”

India: Dalmia Bharat has suspended operations across its entire integrated cement production apparatus, equalling 26.5Mt/yr capacity, as of 26 March 2020. The move is a response to a government ordnance of 25 March 2020 imposing a 21-day lockdown on the whole of India due to the coronavirus. The company will implement the closure ‘until further notice,’ according to Mint News.

Dalmia Bharat CEO and managing director Mahendra Singhi said, “While cement production is continuous in nature and the plants have requisite permission from both the state and the central governments to operate with minimum employees during the lockdown, Dalmia Bharat will only carry out mandatory activities required for safety and security of the plants in the larger interest of its staff.”

Coronavirus had claimed 13 lives in India on 27 March 2020.

India: Several cement producers have responded to the coronavirus pandemic with plant closures. Reuters has reported that India Cements has temporarily closed all of its plants. JK Lakshmi Cement has suspended cement production at its 4.2Mt/yr integrated plant in Jaykaypuram, Rajasthan and at three grinding plants. JK Lakshmi subsidiary Udaipur Cement Works has shut its 1.6Mt/yr integrated Udaipur plant, also in Rajasthan.

Dalmia Bharat refractory production subsidiary Dalmia-OCL’s CEO Sameer Dagpaal told the Business Standard newspaper that he expected the virus’ impact on the company to be ‘relatively limited,’ with a slowdown in demand from the cement sector lasting at most ‘a couple of months.’ He noted that there had been ‘some minor supply-side disruptions relating to a shortage of raw materials from China.’

On 24 March 2020 the all-India total number of coronavirus cases crossed 500, with nine dead, according to Al Jazeera. 200 cases are in the western states of Maharashtra and Kerala.

India: Dalmia Cement (Bharat) has started producing oil well cement at its Khelrihat plant in Meghalaya. The subsidiary of Dalmia Bharat says that it is cement manufacturer to obtain a license for manufacturing oil well cement in the north east region of the country from the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), according to the Economic Times newspaper. This new unit it intended to serve markets in Assam, Tripura and Mizoram, Myanmar and Bangladesh. Dalmia Bharat has been producing oil well cement at its Dalmiapuram plant in Tamil Nadu since the mid-1980s.

India: Integrated cement and grinding plants expansions by companies including Dalmia Bharat, JK Cement and Aditya Birla subsidiary UltraTech of an additional 23Mt/yr are set to bring India’s total installed cement capacity to 508Mt/yr by the end of 2020. Business Standard newspaper has reported that steady prices year-on-year and ‘softening input costs’ have facilitated the expansions in spite of a ‘flattish trend in industry-wide volume growth.’

India: Dalmia Bharat has successfully lobbied the Sundargarh, Orisha district government to request the inclusion of the company’s proposed 446 acre expansion to its Lanjiberna limestone and dolomite mine in the agenda of a village meeting in Kukuda, in which public opinion and suggestions will be recorded. The New India Express Newspaper has reported that, due to the special status of Kukuda as a Scheduled Tribal area, the village meeting forms a necessary preliminary step prior to district government permission of planned works. In October 2018, villagers in nearby Jhagarpur successfully blocked construction of Dalmia Bharat’s proposed Industrial Training Institute. The Lanjiberna mine will serve Dalmia Bharat’s 2.3Mt/yr integrated Rajgangpur plant, which was completed in 2019 at a cost of US$281m and awaits commissioning.

India: Dalmia Bharat CEO and managing director Mahendra Singhi will continue to serve as president of the Cement Manufacturers’ Association (CMA), a role to which he was previously appointed in December 2018. Signhi said, “Indian cement is working on low carbon technology map and remaining fully sustainable. I look forward to making 2020 an even more prolific year.” The Indian Express has reported that the new CMA vice president will be LafargeHolcim subsidiary ACC CEO and managing director Neeraj Akhouri.

India: The Cement Manufacturers Association (CMA) has elected Mahendra Singhi, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Dalmia Cement (Bharat), as its new president. He succeeds Shailendra Chouksey, according to the Press Trust of India. Singhi was previously the president of the Rajasthan Manufacturers Association. He also ran Shree Cement before leading Dalmia Bharat group.

India: Dalmia Cement (Bharat) has appointed Ujjwal Batria as its chief operating officer. Batria will be in charge of leading the company's sales, marketing, logistics, manufacturing, logistics, manufacturing and technical services departments, according to the Economic Times newspaper. He holds 33 years of industry experience with roles such as the chief executive officer (CEO) for Nuvoco Vistas (formerly Lafarge India) and positions at the cement divisions of Tata Steel and Century Textiles & Industries.

UltraTech Cement’s deal to buy the cement business of Century Textiles & Industries could see it become the world’s third largest cement producer by production capacity outside of China.

It announced this week that it had entered into an acquisition agreement to buy the cement subsidiary of BK Birla Group for US$1.26bn. If the deal completes then it will gain three integrated plants in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra respectively with a combined production capacity of 11.4Mt/yr and a 1Mt/yr grinding plant in West Bengal. At this point UltraTech Cement will increase its production capacity to 106Mt/yr seeing it become the third largest cement producer in the world in Global Cement’s Top 100 Report.

This latest deal is subject to the usual regulatory approval from competition bodies and the like. Bustling past this step seems far from clear at this stage given that UltraTech Cement owns cement plants already in each of the four states the proposed purchases are in. It has described the purchase as giving it, …”the opportunity for further strengthening its presence in the highly fragmented, competitive and fast growing East and Central markets and extending its footprint in the Western and Southern markets.” Synergy savings from procurement and logistics are expected to follow with further benefits to be gained from the company’s distribution network. Local and national competitors may not see it the same way and the fallout from a price war could be damaging for smaller producers.

As covered previously, UltraTech Cement seems hell bent on winning its on-going fight against Dalmia Bharat to buy Binani Cement. Rightly or wrongly UltraTech Cement tried to muscle its way into buying Binani by making a bid directly to its owners after it lost an auction for it. Legal wrangling has followed as the insolvency process for Binani Cement has clashed against the auction process of the administrator. At the time of writing it is still far from clear which company will win.

Comparing the prices of the two latest acquisition targets by UltraTech Cement may offer some insight of its motivations. The Binani Cement assets roll in at just over US$125/t of production capacity. Although, as noted below, some of this is located outside of India. The Century Textiles & Industries assets are being purchased for a little over US$100/t. This is interesting as it is lower that the Binani cost, although the close links between BK Birla Group and UltraTech Cement’s owner Aditya Birla may help to explain this.

UltraTech Cement’s milestone as it surpasses the 100Mt/yr capacity level will mark a continuing change in the world’s cement industry as it moves away from Europe and North America to developing economies. As ever the classification is a bit of a fudge given that Global Cement’s top producers list excludes Chinese producers. Partly this arises from the difficulty obtaining reliable data on the Chinese industry. Partly this comes from top producer’s list looking at multinational companies over (extremely) large national ones. Due to this UltraTech Cement remains a regional player. Or it will at least until it (or if it) manages to buy Binani Cement. Some of the assets included in that sale include plants in both the UAE and China. At this point UltraTech Cement’s claim to be the third biggest cement producer in the world will be secure.