Global Cement News

US: Cemex says that a class action lawsuit filed with the Southern District Court of New York in 2018 has been dismissed. The legal action was made by a group of investors who allege that they were misled in relation to an alleged corruption case in Colombia. The building materials company said that the decision of the court was final and that the plaintiffs would not be entitled to a new trial,

The legal proceedings followed reports in 2018 that the US Department of Justice had requested information from Cemex about a case of alleged corruption in the construction of the Maceo cement plant in Colombia. In 2016 Cemex fired several senior staff members in relation to the Maceo project and its subsidiary’s chief executive resigned. This followed an internal audit and investigation into payments worth around US$20m made to a non-governmental third party in connection with the acquisition of the land, mining rights and benefits of the tax free zone for the project.

Cape Verde: Turkey’s OYAK is planning to invest in pozzolan extraction following a meeting between OYAK's Cement Concrete Paper Group chairman Suat Çalbiyik and prime minister Ulisses Correia e Silva. Mining activity has remained muted since Cabocem, an Italian company, closed in 2013, according to Sapo. OYAK has operations in the country via Portugal’s Cimpor, which it acquired in 2019.

US: Turkey’s Çimsa has launched a new white cement product for the US market at the World of Concrete trade fair in Las Vegas. The subsidiary of Sabancı Holding has showcased its Çimsa Aluminates and Çimsa Super White product ranges.

“As one of the largest grey cement producers of Turkey, Çimsa is among the top three in the global league of white cement. We have increased our visibility in the global cement industry through our investments abroad,” said, Çimsa’s chief executive officer (CEO) Ülkü Özcan. He added that the cement producer founded its Cimsa Americas Cement Manufacturing and Sales Corp in the US in 2017. It then started operations at a grinding mill in Houston, Texas in 2019.

Denmark: FLSmidth has increased the sales from its cement division despite ‘challenging’ marketing conditions. Its revenue grew by 3% year-on-year to Euro1.13bn in 2019 from Euro1.10bn in 2018. Its earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) rose by 28% to Euro65m from Euro51m. It achieved this despite its order intake falling by 16% to Euro1bn from Euro1.19bn. It attributed its revenue increase to high order backlog conversion and positive currency exchange effects. Internal efficiency measures and a ‘selective’ approach to large projects were also said to have helped.

“We were pleased to see that the financial performance of our Cement business showed a positive development despite challenging market conditions,” said FLSmidth Group chief executive officer (CEO) Thomas Schulz. He added that sustainability and digitalisation would be key differentiators in the coming years and that the engineering company was ‘well-positioned’ in both areas.

China: On 9 February 2020 Taiwan Cement announced the extended suspension of operations at some of its Chinese plants closed due to the coronavirus outbreak to 16 February 2020. Taiwan Cement acknowledged the possibility of ‘some effects on financial figures this year,’ but said that it had adopted the measures to minimise the effect of the outbreak on operations.