Global Cement News

China: Song Zhiping will step down as the director and the chairman of the board of directors of China National Building Material (CNBM). He will leave the posts at the company’s annual general meeting (AGM) in mid-June 2018. He will remain as chairman, and secretary of the Party Committee, of China National Building Material Group, the major shareholder of CNBM. Song Zhiping was appointed as chairman of the board of directors in 2005. Since then the company has become one of the largest building materials manufacturers in the world.

Other personnel changes include the departure of Guo Chaomin as director of the company and Xu Weibing will leave as supervisor and the chairman of the supervisory committee. Guo Chaomin has originally appointed as a non-executive director in 2011.

Proposed staff to be elected at the AGM include Peng Jianxin as executive director of the company, Xu Weibing, Shen Yungang and Fan Xiaoyan as non-executive directors and Li Xinhua and Guo Yanming as supervisors of the company.

Paraguay: Jorge Méndez has resigned as the president of Industria Nacional del Cemento (INC). He had been in post since 2013, according to La Nación newspaper.

US: Simon Shipp has become the general manager of Aumund USA. He holds over 25 years of international experience in mechanical engineering, in particular with conveying equipment for bulk materials. Shipp succeeds Geoffrey Conroy who has held the post for nearly 20 years. Conroy will remain on the board in a consultant role.

UK: The UK Quality Ash Association (UKQAA) has appointed Tarmac’s Allan Everett as the association’s new chair, taking over from Power Minerals’ Ivan Skidmore. Everett will be joined by Richard Boult, who has also been announced as the UKQAA’s new Technical Committee Chair. Boult is Commercial Technical Manager at Cemex UK. He will work with UKQAA’s Technical Committee members to develop and assess technical projects exploring new sources and uses for quality ash.

The UKQAA is an industry association for the use of quality ash in construction and engineering applications and represents a range of members from across the construction supply chain.

Germany: HeidelbergCement has increased its sales volumes of cement in the first quarter of 2018 despite facing poor weather and coping with reduced working days. Sales volumes of cement rose by 2% year-on-year to 28.2Mt from 27.5Mt in the same period in 2017. Falling sales volumes in Europe and North America were offset by growth in Asia-Pacific and Africa-Eastern Mediterranean Basin. In Asia, Indonesia and India contributed strongly to its growth, the cement producer said. In Africa, increases in sales volumes were recorded in Egypt, Ghana and Tanzania. Its sales revenue increased on a like-for-like basis by 2% to Euro3.78bn.

“HeidelbergCement generated a profit in the seasonally weak first quarter and despite difficult weather conditions,” said Bernd Scheifele, chairman of the managing board of HeidelbergCement. “Our successful management of the portfolio and financial result more than compensated for the weather-related decline in operating result.”

The group completed its acquisition of Cementir Italia in Italy and the Alex Fraser Group in Australia in the reporting period. It also finished the sale of the sand-lime brick operating line in Germany and its white cement business in the US.