Displaying items by tag: Southern Province Cement

Saudi Arabia: Southern Province Cement has signed a 25-year solar energy power purchase agreement (PPA) with Tarshid Energy Solutions for its Bisha cement plant. The company said it will pay an average of US$1.07m/yr under the agreement. The solar power will reportedly be purchased at a cost lower than the company’s current electricity supply.

Construction of the solar system will begin on 1 October 2025, with operations expected to start in the third quarter of 2026. Southern Province Cement said that it will not require project funding, as it will not bear any capital or operational expenses. The company did not disclose details on the capacity of the new solar power plant.

Saudi Arabia: Southern Province Cement announced that its memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Yanbu Cement, aimed at assessing the feasibility of a potential merger, has expired without conclusion. The MoU was first signed in June 2024 and extended in June 2025 for an additional three months. That extension lapsed on 22 September 2025, Southern Province Cement said in a filing to the Saudi Stock Exchange.

Saudi Arabia: Southern Province Cement recorded net profits of US$11.2m in the first half of 2025, down by 59% year-on-year from US$27.7m. Revenues fell by 11% to US$111m from US$124m in the first half of 2024. In the second quarter of 2025, profits dropped by 50% year-on-year to US$4m, while revenues declined by 9% to US$52m. Quarter-on-quarter, profits fell by 44% from US$7.2m and revenues by 11% from US$59m.

Saudi Arabia: Southern Province Cement Company has ordered a crossbelt analyser for stockpile optimisation and an airslide analyser for raw mill control from SpectraFlow for its new Line 3 project at the Jazan cement plant. The new line will have a capacity of 5000t/day of clinker.

Saudi Arabia: Southern Province Cement's sales dropped to US$124m in the first half of 2024, down by 2.5% year-on-year. Nonetheless, the company grew its net profit by 36%, to US$24.5m.

Saudi Arabia: Southern Province Cement and Yanbu Cement have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to evaluate a potential merger. The due diligence process will assess various aspects including operational, technical, financial, legal and actuarial factors, according to Mubasher.

The memorandum was signed on 23 June 2024 and is set to expire in 12 months unless a merger agreement is reached beforehand. The feasibility of the merger will depend on agreement on final terms, regulatory approvals and endorsements from both companies' general assemblies.

Saudi Arabia: The net profit of Southern Province Cement rose by 27% year-on-year to US$16.5m in the first quarter of 2024 from US$13.0m a year earlier. However, its revenues fell by 16% relative to the first quarter of 2023, reaching US$66.9m.

Saudi Arabia: Southern Province Cement Company’s revenues fell by 12% year-on-year to US$285m in 2023, from $US325m in 2022. The company’s net profit also fell, by 35% from US$80.2m to US$52m.

Eastern Province Cement said this week that it had awarded a new production line project to Sinoma CDI. The subsidiary of China-based CNBM Group and Sinoma International Engineering has picked up the contract to build a 10,000t/day plant from design to installation at the cement producer’s Al Khursaniyah plant. Word on project finance is to follow later and the contract should be signed by the end of March 2024. The cement company last mentioned the project to the Saudi Exchange back in March 2023, when it suggested that it was focusing on upgrading existing lines at its Al Khursaniyah plant rather than building a brand new clinker plant at Najibiyah. The plans for the latter project date back to 2015. Eastern Province Cement holds limestone extraction licences in both locations.

It is worth noting that the last couple of new conventional production line projects announced in Saudi Arabia have been picked up by Sinoma International Engineering and related companies. Sinoma International Engineering won an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract to build Southern Province Cement's upcoming Jizan cement plant in May 2023. This followed the awarding of a new 10,000t/day line by Yamama Cement, also to Sinoma International Engineering, in November 2022. However, Germany-based IBAU Hamburg was confirmed by Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies (HGCT) in September 2023 as being the company that would build a ‘clinker-free’ cement plant in Saudi Arabia in 2024. This will be a copy of HGCT’s H2 plant in France, which uses a combination of activated clay, ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) and gypsum to manufacture its products. HGCT has signed a deal with Shurfah Group to build several Hoffman plants under a 22-year exclusive licensing agreement.

Arguably though, despite all these new plant news stories, the bigger issue so far this year was Saudi Aramco's decision to raise its feedstock and fuel prices from the start of 2024. Several Saudi cement producers released warnings in response that production costs would rise and earnings would fall. Al Jouf Cement, Arabian Cement, Qassim Cement, Saudi Cement, Yamama Cement and Yanbu Cement each made statements to shareholders on the issue, saying that they were working out the impact, would announce what this might be when known and that it was likely to make a difference from the first quarter results onwards.

The timing of Aramco's price hike is poor given that after a tough year, with falling sales for some producers, demand was expected to pick up somewhat. Aljazira Capital, for example, in a cement sector report released in late December 2023, forecast a 3% year-on-year increase in cement sales volumes in 2024 following an estimated fall of 8% in 2023. Its reasoning was that the domestic housing construction market had declined in 2023, leading to high levels of competition in the central region of the country caused by high levels of company inventory. Looking ahead, the competition was expected to ease as more projects were generated outside the central region and demand from the country’s various large-scale infrastructure plans took off. We will have to wait for Aljazira Capital’s next report to find out how they think the market will cope with higher fuel costs, but it seems likely that business may remain tougher than expected for the cement producers in the short term at least.

Finally, one more story to consider is that Al Jouf Cement signed a deal with Rabou’ Al-Taybeh Company this week to export cement and clinker to Jordan. The initial period covers six months with the option for renewal. Up until 2022, at least, clinker exports from Saudi Arabia were growing most years since the export rules were relaxed in 2017. With a difficult market reported domestically in 2023, the appetite to focus on exports may be growing and this could be a sign of that. Another example this week of Saudi-based cement companies looking outside the domestic market could be detected when Northern Region Cement said it had sold a 49% stake in its Iraq business to Al-Diyar Al-Iraqia for Investments Company. The cement company said that the new strategic partnership would help it to further expand its investments in the promising market. It will use the proceeds of the deal to repay loans and for ‘external investments.’ It valued the transaction at just under US$44m. For more on what Northern Region Cement and others have been up to in Iraq, see Global Cement Weekly’s analysis from November 2023.

The steady stream of new clinker production lines suggests confidence in the cement sector in Saudi Arabia in the medium to long term. It is also fascinating to witness a secondary cementitious material plant like the one HGCT is planning on the way too. Unfortunately though, the recent fuel price rise looks like it might ruin the party in the short term for those hoping for better things in 2024.

The 26th Arab International Cement & Building Materials Conference and Exhibition takes place in Cairo on 15 - 17 January 2024. Visit Global Cement at stand N3

Saudi Arabia: During the third quarter of 2023, Southern Province Cement reported sales of US$76.2m. This represents an 11% drop year-on-year from US$86.1m during the same quarter in 2022. Reuters has reported that the company noted lower local demand for cement. Meanwhile, its net profit dropped by 41% to US$14.1m from US$23.7m, amid a year-on-year rise in operating expenses.