Displaying items by tag: Southern Province Cement

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.

Saudi Arabia: Southern Province Cement has secured a loan worth US$373m from Saudi National Bank. The loan will cover its construction of a 5000t/day production line at its upcoming Jizan cement plant, as well as the construction of infrastructure for a second new line of the same capacity at the plant. The producer appointed China-based Sinoma International Engineering to build the plant in May 2023.

Reuters has reported that the loan has a duration of 10 years and a two-year grace period.

Sinoma International Engineering was revealed this week as the winner of a contract to build a new production line at Southern Province Cement’s Jizan plant. The China-based engineering firm said that the US$330m contract was to build a full line, from limestone crushing to bagging, with an output of 5000t/day. The construction period is expected to take just over two years, suggesting a commissioning date in mid-2025 if work starts now. The project has been in the pipeline for a while with an announcement in mid-2021. It was previously reported that the new line is intended to replace the two existing production lines at the site once completed.

Other recent projects in the country include Yamama Cement’s plans to move its cement plant near Riyadh to a new location. Sinoma International Engineering was also selected as the main contractor in November 2022 for the US$220m project. The relocated line – using both old and new equipment – will have a production capacity of 10,000t/yr. Project duration was estimated at around two-and-a half years following financial contractual commitments. So the earliest this one might be completed is also mid-2025. Eastern Province Cement also started making moves to build a new major upgrade in March 2023 when it started the tendering process for a planned 10,000t/day production line at its Al Khursaniyah Plant. The intention is to replace some of the obsolete lines at the unit. The project dates back to 2015, when it was first announced.

Graph 1: Domestic cement sales and clinker exports in Saudi Arabia, 2013 – 2022. Source: Yamama Cement

The timing of these new projects is compelling given that sales by the local industry peaked in 2015. They declined in 2018 to a low of around 40Mt before stabilising at around 50Mt for the last three years. However, one trend to note is how clinker exports reached 7.1Mt in 2022, the highest figure in a decade, since export rules were relaxed in 2017. They have grown year-on-year since 2018 with the exception of 2020. Cement exports have been lower since 2013 hitting a high of 1.9Mt in 2019, although 2022 was nearly as good at 1.8Mt.

The other big news story from the local sector in 2023 was the US$37m fine that the General Authority for Competition (GAC) levied for price fixing in April 2023. 14 of the 17 main cement companies in the country were found to have broken local competition law following an investigation. Detail on specifically what happened is light, but the GAC said that it took exception to companies “controlling prices of commodities and services meant for sale by increasing, decreasing, fixing their prices or in any other manner detrimental to lawful competition.”

As ever with the Saudi construction market, government spending is expected to keep things buoyant. Although input and logistic costs have risen like everywhere else, energy costs have also risen. This, no doubt, is useful to a government planning on building a bunch of so-called ‘Giga’ projects. Local sales of cement may have dipped slightly in 2022 but building all these big new projects will require plenty of cement. A report by the SICO Bank in January 2023 forecast that local cement demand was expected to remain ‘flat’ in 2023 but that it would grow by 5% year-on-year in 2024. Interestingly, it added that demand from the tourism and exhibition sector would also fuel demand in the run-up to 2030 as various schemes connected to the ‘Giga’ projects reached fruition.

Each of the three projects detailed above are intended to replace existing capacity. This suggests that none of these companies expect the market to grow significantly anytime soon. These cement producers are likely to be focusing on improving efficiencies from their existing market share. Alongside this, exports of cement and clinker have grown, giving combined local and export sales that are similar to the market peak in 2015. Efficiency savings and adapting to a mature market appear to be the way forward for Saudi cement producers in the near-term.

Saudi Arabia: China-based Sinoma International Engineering has won an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract to build Southern Province Cement's upcoming Jizan cement plant, in the province of the same name. YiCai Global News has reported that the plant will have a capacity of 1.83Mt/yr. Commissioning is scheduled to follow 27 months after the start of construction. Sinoma International Engineering's contract covers installation of the entire line, from limestone crushing to cement bagging. The value of the work is US$300m.

Fellow CNBM subsidiary Sinoma Overseas Development previously won a US$220m contract with Yamama Cement for transferal of its Riyadh cement plant's new Line 7 from its old plant to its new location.