Global Cement News

US: Queens Carbon has secured US$10m in seed funding to scale up production of its novel cement and supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs). The start-up will build a 2000t/yr demonstration plant at strategic partner Buzzi Unicem USA's Stockertown, Pennsylvania, cement plant. The plant will demonstrate Queens Carbon’s low-energy Q-Reactor technology, which employs novel hydrothermal chemistry, with the help of steam and pressure, to combine standard cement feedstocks into carbon-neutral hydraulic cement and SCMs. The company’s flagship product, Q-SCM, is capable of replacing up to 50% of cement in concrete mixes. Queens Carbon says that it will now also begin preparations for its first full-scale commercial plant.

Buzzi Unicem USA was among investors in the seed funding round, led by Climate technologies investor Clean Energy Ventures, with participation from fellow venture capital firm Plug and Play.

Queens Carbon CEO Daniel Kopp said "With support from Clean Energy Ventures, Buzzi Unicem USA and the US Department of Energy, we're building next-generation technology and assembling the creative talent needed to drive industry revenues to move cement innovation forward and significantly reduce CO₂ emissions from cement production, all without a green premium."

Luigi Buzzi, Chief Technology Officer at Italy-based Buzzi, said "We know that achieving our goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 demands forward-thinking solutions to enhance both our operations and our environmental performance.”

Pakistan: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has introduced a new valuation mechanism for collecting sales tax on cement, effective 1 May 2025. Under the revised approach, the FBR will use the average national retail price of cement as reported in the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics' (PBS) weekly Sensitive Price Index (SPI). Average prices will be calculated just before the 1st and 16th of each month, with the values used to calculate taxes for the approximately two-week periods that begin on the corresponding dates.

FBR officials said the decision aims to prevent under-invoicing practices within the cement sector by aligning the taxable value with officially reported retail prices.
By using PBS data as the benchmark, the FBR expects to streamline sales tax collection and reduce revenue leakage in the cement supply chain.

North Macedonia: Cementarnica Usje, part of Greece’s Titan Cement, said that its net profit plunged by 47% year-on-year to €2.6m in the first three months of 2025. This was despite just a 2% decrease in total operating revenues, which came in at US$19.5m over the three-month period. Total operating expenses grew by 22% year-on-year to US$15.2m, mostly due to higher costs for raw materials.

Morocco: Cement sales increased by 4.5% during the first quarter of 2025, to reach 3.38Mt, according to the Department of Financial Studies and Forecasts. Sales in the same period of 2024 were 3.25Mt. This growth was reportedly driven in particular by the precast concrete sector, which saw growth of 16.8%, and the ready-mix concrete sector, which grew by 18.6% year-on-year.

Angola: The government has announced that it expects to receive around US$240m from the privatisation of three companies owned by China International Found (CIF) Angola, following the auction of their factories. As well as CIF Automobile Assembly Unit and CIF Lowenda Beer Factory, the government is privatising CIF Cement Cement Factory, for which it anticipates receiving US$197m for the asset. The Griner/Ciment/Mercons consortium was the preferred bidder, with the H&S/Yupeng consortium second, Moçambique Dugongo Cimentos third and Huaxin Cement fourth.

The three companies were previously nationalised by the Angolan state as part of an anti-corruption process.