Spain: Sergio Martínez Hernández has been appointed as the new director of LafargeHolcim’s Carboneras cement plant in Almería. Martínez Hernández holds over 24 years of experience in the cement industry, according to Teleprensa. He joined Holcim in 1993 after training as an engineer at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales (ETSII) in Madrid. During his career he has worked at plants in Gádor in Almería, Yepes in Toledo and Portland in Colorado, USA.

India: Shri C Madhusudana Rao has resigned as a director and a committee member of Kakatiya Cement Sugar & Industries on personal grounds. His departure took effect on 24 July 2017.

South Africa: PPC has announced that its CEO Darryll Castle will be stepping down to pursue other interests. In a statement PPC said that Castle will remain ‘available’ to the group for six months to ensure a smooth handover. Johan Claassen, the current managing director of PPC, has been appointed as the interim CEO.

PPC reported a 93% fall in full-year earnings in June 2017 due to a liquidity crisis precipitated by the cut in its credit rating to junk status.

Meanwhile, the resignation of Tito Mboweni, one of PPC’s independent non-executive directors has fuelled speculation in the South African press about the ongoing merger discussions between PPC and Afrisam. Some believe that there may be ‘irreconcilable disagreement’ between Mboweni and the wider board about the strategic direction of PPC with respect to Afrisam.

The old joke about buses only coming along in pairs might just apply to Angolan cement plants this week with the inauguration of Nova Cimangola’s new 2.4Mt/yr cement plant in Luanda. It follows the announcement of the start of an upgrade project to build a clinker kiln at Cimenfort’s grinding plant in Benguela. In cement industry terms for a country with a production capacity below 10Mt/yr these projects are right on top of each other!

Nova Cimangola’s new plant has been a well-publicised project internationally. Sinoma International Engineering coordinated the line for US$400m in 21 months using components from well-known suppliers. Loesche provided a number of raw material, cement and coal mills for the project, including the country’s first vertical roller mill, as well as other components and parts. Loesche’s Austrian subsidiary A Tec also got involved as an EPCM (Engineering, Procurement & Construction Management) partner.

Cimenfort’s clinker kiln project is the third phase of a process to turn its grinding plant at Catumbela in Benguela into a fully integrated unit since it opened in 2012. Earlier phases saw the grinding plant’s capacity increase to 1.4Mt/yr from 0.7Mt/yr by using a new roller press. Work on the kiln is now scheduled to start in January 2018 with completion scheduled for 2020.

If Cimenfort makes it to clinker production they will join the country’s three main producers: Nova Cimangola, Fabrica de Cimento do Kwanza Sul (FCKS) and the China International Fund. Getting that far is by no means certain as the Palanca Cement plant project demonstrates. That scheme was backed by Brazil’s Camargo Corrêa, the owners of InterCement, and local business group Gema. However, the regulators bailed out Portugal’s Banco Espírito Santo, the financial backer of the project, in 2014 effectively killing it. Another project that has gone on the back burner is Portugal’s Secil’s plan to build a second plant next to its grinding plant in Lobito. Originally approved by the Angolan government in 2007 the project has been kicked around since then through various revisions to the local investment body. It was last reported as being under consideration by the president’s office of Angola in 2016.

Ministry of Industry figures place cement production capacity at 8.3Mt/yr compared to a consumption of 6Mt/yr. In contrast to this Secil’s parent company Semapa reported that the Angolan cement market contracted in 2016 by 25% to 3.9Mt in line with the poor state of the general economy, pushed down by poor oil prices. It blamed the decrease in cement consumption on a halt in public infrastructure spending and the negative effect that local currency devaluations had on clinker imports and other incoming raw materials. With the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasting economic growth to pick up for Angola in 2017, improvements in the construction and cement sector are expected by Semapa but they hadn’t been seen so far during the first quarter of the year.

The government’s keenness to describe its cement industry as ‘self-sufficient in cement’ mimics calls from other African countries like Nigeria. The Angolan government banned cement imports in 2015, with the exception of certain border provinces, and this has continued into 2017. However, the ban hasn’t stopped the country exporting cement to its neighbours. Earlier this year the head of Cimenterie de Lukala in the Democratic Republic of Congo blamed the closure of his company’s integrated plant on imports from Angola.

All of this leaves an enlarged local cement industry waiting for the good times to come again. In the meantime, exporting cement and clinker no doubt seems like a promising proposition. In the middle of this are projects like those from Cimenfort and Secil that are looking decidedly dicey in the current economic environment. These companies may have just missed the bus to make their upgrades happen. Still, if they wait around long enough, their chance may come again when the market revives.

Indonesia: Rizkan Chandra, the President Director of Semen Indonesia, has died at the age of 48 years. He was appointed to the post in May 2016 for the period 2016 – 2020, according to the Jakarta Globe newspaper. Rizkan, who graduated from the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) in 1987, was previously appointed as strategy and business development director at the cement producer. He was also a former network and information technology director at Telekomunikasi Indonesia (Telkom).

Darmawan Junaidi will be the acting president director for Semen Indonesia. He has previously served as finance director for the company.

Jamaica: Colin Steele has been elected as a director of Caribbean Cement. However, the board of directors of the cement producer tried to block the appointment by changing the company’s articles of incorporation that required at least two Jamaican-based directors, according to the Jamaica Observer. The company had been without a second Jamaican-domiciled director since the resignation of its former chairman Chris Dehring in 2016. Minority shareholders of the company supported Steele’s appointment.

Steele started his career as a certified public accountant before moving into retail and housing development. He has served as a director of several government companies, including the Port Authority of Jamaica and the University Hospital of the West Indies and as chairman of the Economic Policy committee of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica.

Finland: Perttu Louhiluoto, President of Metso's Minerals Services business area and a member of the Metso Executive Team, has decided to leave Metso by the end of 2017 at the latest. He has been employed by Metso since 2008 and has held several management positions in various Metso businesses.

Sad news this week from the Talcahuano cement plant in Chile that is to stop producing clinker. Local media reports that the Cementos Bío Bío unit has decided to import clinker from Asia instead, which will reduce its production costs. At the same time it has laid off a third of its workforce. The plant has been producing cement since 1961.

The decision carries echoes of Holcim New Zealand’s closure of its Westport cement plant in 2016, another unit in a country on the Pacific Rim. However, in that country LafargeHolcim has purposely moved towards becoming a distribution company by opening import terminals and depots. Plus the local subsidiary benefits from the cement-trading arm of a multinational company. By contrast, local producer Cementos Bío Bío still retains two integrated plants and a grinding plant in Chile. Following the closure its production share from integrated plants will drop to 2.4Mt/yr (39%) from 3.2Mt/yr (45%). The country will retain a total production capacity of 6.2Mt/yr from its clinker producing plants.

The timing of Cementos Bío Bío’s decision is also interesting given that the Chilean competition authority (TDLC) approved Hurtado Vicuña Group to buy a controlling stake in Cemento Polpaico from LafargeHolcim in early July 2017. The deal was originally announced in October 2016 to sell LafargeHolcim’s 54.3% stake in Cemento Polpaico for US$225m. The sale includes one integrated plant with a cement production capacity of 2.3Mt/yr and two grinding plants. Hurtado Vicuña has not been required by the regulator to sell any of its cement units but it has been asked to sell parts of its concrete business and to abide to a ban on repurchasing the assets within 10 years. Hurtado Vicuña owns Cementos BSA, a subsidiary that runs the El Bosque cement grinding plant in Santiago and it has just started-up production at a new 0.95Mt/yr grinding plant at Quilicura, also near the capital.

In its 2016 annual report LafargeHolcim reported that cement sales volumes of cement fell in Chile due to a fall in the residential construction market in the second half of the year. However it did manage to raise its operating earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBTIDA) off the back of higher prices and lower production costs compared to the previous year. Cementos Bío Bío concurred with this assessment of the market in its 2016 report, lamenting the country’s poor economic growth since 2015 and declines in the mining and construction sectors. Despite this its cement despatches rose very slightly to 1.56Mt in 2016. The big drop in its sales occurred in 2014 when its sales fell by 10% year-on-year to 1.51Mt. More recently, Bío Bío noted a 37% decrease in its operating profit for its cement, concrete and lime division for the first quarter of 2017 due to falling sales volumes and margins in cement and lime. However, it did benefit from falling costs for energy and petcoke inputs. The group also announced plans to sell a minority stake in itself in February 2017.

These stories show another country that is realigning its cement industry to a clinker-rich world market. Chile appears to retain a ‘big three’ group of local clinker producers that has shifted with the rise of Cementos BSA and the departure of LafargeHolcim. However, the market share in the cement grinding business has changed significantly as Cementos BSA has gained both an integrated plant and a more national profile, away from the capital, with its grinding plants. Once the local market picks up it will be interesting to see whether this trend towards clinker import and local grinding continues.

UK: Michel Andre has been appointed as the Country President for Cemex UK. He joins the UK subsidiary of the Mexican-based building materials producer after spending seven years as the Country President for Cemex France. Andre has worked for Cemex’s French business for 12 years with roles in strategic planning and its readymix business. Previous to this he worked for Lafarge in the US and France and was employed by Pricewaterhouse Coopers.

He has also served as a board member and then president of the Unicem Association France, the National Union of Quarrying and Building Materials Industries. His three-year term finished in June 2017.

Andre succeeds Jesús Gonzalez in the UK post. Gonzalez has been promoted to the executive team in Monterrey, Mexico as Executive Vice President Sustainability and Operations Development. His role covers health and safety, operations and technology, energy, sourcing, research and development and sustainability.

Uzbekistan: Bakhtiyor Bakhronbekovich Bobokulov has been appointed as the deputy chairman of the board for the production and implementation of modern technologies at Uzqurilishmateriallari, the Uzbek Construction Materials company. Previously, Bobokulov held the post of general director at the subsidiary Samarkandmramor.