Displaying items by tag: Fitch

Manoj Kumar Rustagi was on hand yesterday to discuss JSW Cement’s operations in the UAE at the Virtual Middle Eastern Cement Conference. At the event, jointly organised by Global Cement Magazine and the Arab Union for Cement and Building Materials (AUCBM), Rustagi mainly stuck to the development of the producer’s new integrated plant in the Fujairah Free Zone but he also gave an overview of JSW Cement’s presence in India. For example, as part of an industrial conglomerate, JSW Group, the cement producer benefits from links to steel production by JSW Steel that enables it to use blast furnace slag. Notably, JSW Cement’s Shiva Cement subsidiary announced plans at the end of November 2020 to spend around US$200m on a new 1.4Mt/yr integrated cement plant in Sundergarh district, Odisha with the clinker production line supplied by ThyssenKrupp Industries India.

JSW Cement is not alone in ordering new production capacity. This week, UltraTech Cement approved a planned increase of 12.87Mt/yr for around US$740m. This is in addition to new capacity projects of 6.7Mt/yr that are currently underway. All of these new projects are scheduled to be commissioned in a phased manner by the end of the 2023 Indian financial year (by March 2023). It is unclear at present how exactly these projects are distributed but they are centred in the Northern, Central and Western Zones of the country, and the new tranche includes the previously announced Pali plant in Rajasthan. At this price the inference is that the much of the new capacity will be in the form of grinding plants and/or upgrades to existing clinker lines. Around the same time as this, LafargeHolcim said it wants to spend US$112m on waste heat recovery (WHR) plants for six of its cement plants in India by the end of 2022.

Graph 1: Change in Indian cement production year-on-year (%). Source: Office of the Economic Adviser.

These three projects by major producers suggest that the Indian cement sector is recovering from the effects of the coronavirus lockdown in late March 2020. Graph 1 above shows the sector finally recovering in October 2020, with growth of 3% year-on-year to 26.9Mt. Kumar Mangalam Birla, the chairman of Aditya Birla Group, credited the economic situation with the Indian government’s Atmanirbhar Bharat stimulus program for his decision to commit to UltraTech Cement’s spending spree. This outlook gels with that of Fitch Ratings. The credit ratings agency has forecast in a recent report that ‘strong’ margins during the first half of the 2021 financial year (April – September 2020) are going to limit the financial risks to the larger Indian cement companies despite the lower cement sales volumes due to coronavirus. Pent-up demand helped the industry recover after the lockdown and this was further aided by lower energy/fuel costs and general cost cutting.

Needless to say all of the above is good news for the Indian cement industry after the year it has had. One thought to consider from all of this is who might UltraTech Cement order its mills and clinker lines from? Atmanirbhar, the name of the Indian stimulus plan, has been described as ‘self-reliance’ or ‘self-sufficiency’ in the local press. Unfortunately, relations have been poor between India and China in 2020 due to armed skirmishes along the Line of Actual Control on the border, amongst other issues. Ordering a new clinker production line from, say China-based Sinoma, may not look especially ‘self-sufficient’ in the current climate.

The proceedings pack and video from the Virtual Middle Eastern Cement Conference 2020 is availabe to buy now

India: Credit rating agency Fitch Ratings has forecast a 15% year-on-year decline in domestic cement demand in the 2021 financial year, which ends on 30 March 2021 due to “weak property demand and a sluggish construction cycle.” Fitch Ratings gave the reasons for the decline as “low consumer confidence caused by business uncertainty and unemployment concerns,” causing “underlying appetites of financial institutions to lend to the construction sector to remain weak” in spite of the Reserve Bank of India’s temporary funding relief measures to the sector, which include “loan restructuring, moratoriums and relaxed lending limits.”

Fitch Ratings reported that steel demand will also fall by 10% in the 2021 financial year.

Thailand: Fitch Ratings forecasts that demand for cement will rise due to recovery in the private construction sector. It is expected to grow by over 5% in 2019, according to the Bangkok Post. Cement sales rose by 3.7% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2018, the first quarterly growth in 10 quarters. Data from the Office of Industrial Economics showed that this was followed by a rise of 2.8% in the fourth quarter of 2018.

The forecast said that local cement producers were expanding regionally due to domestic oversupply and a profitability gap between domestic sales and exports. Government infrastructure projects are expected to continue to drive sales, with nearly US$100bn planned on projects from 2018 to 2026.

Indonesia: The Fitch credit rating agency says that cement sales are starting to rise due to increased investment in infrastructure projects but that overcapacity will continue to limit improvements in cement producers' profitability. Indonesian Cement Association's (ASI) data show that domestic cement sales volumes rose by 7% year-on-year in May 2017 to 5.5Mt. Sales volumes for January to May 2017 increased by 4% to 25.3Mt.

Fitch has attributed this growth to a 13% growth in sales of bulk cement, which is used mainly for infrastructure-related developments. By region, the main driver of the increase was in central Java, where toll road projects are underway and where sales rose by 17%. Demand for bagged cement, which is generally used for property developments, rose by 5% in May 2017.