12 May 2016
Hyundai Cement could be on sale in 2016 12 May 2016
South Korea: Creditors could put Hyundai Cement on sale in 2016, according to sources quoted by the Korea Herald. The South Korean cement producer has been on a debt management scheme. Its creditors, led by the state-run Korea Development Bank, will be able to complete any sale when the lock-up period on their shares in the company expire at the end of 2016.
Previously the company suffered financially from the misfortunes of its affiliate Sungwoo Engineering & Construction. Sungwoo has since been sold to other investors.
FLSmidth and GE to partner on data platform 12 May 2016
Denmark/US: FLSmidth and GE (formerly General Electric) have announced a partnership to create digital solutions for increasing productivity in the cement and minerals industries. The new solutions developed on GE's cloud-based Predix platform will use FLSmidth's knowledge of cement and minerals processing along with GE's industrial application of networked physical objects (the internet of things) to increase the productivity of connected equipment units in the cement and mining industry.
FLSmidth will build their solutions on top of the Predix platform with applications for managing process flows. This should allow customers to leverage process data and analytics for monitoring, benchmarking their performance and predicting maintenance of their equipment.
"Cement and mining companies already collect significant volumes of data, but currently, only a fraction of it is used. This will be the first available solution for a full coherent process monitoring to leverage optimisation solutions offered by a full service provider like FLSmidth," said FLSmidth’s head of Global Research & Development Jens Almdal.
Switzerland: LafargeHolcim’s net sales have fallen by 5.5% year-on-year to Euro6.06bn in the first quarter of 2016 from Euro6.41bn in the same period in 2015. Its sales volumes of cement rose slightly by 1.4% to 56.6Mt from 55.8Mt. Its earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) fell by 15.6% to Euro774m. It blamed the fall in sales on ‘challenging conditions’ in Nigeria, Brazil and India.
By region the cement producer reported that sales volumes of cement in Asia Pacific rose by 6.6% to 30.1Mt supported by a stabilisation of the Chinese economy with growth in March 2016. However, its sales revenue was affected by low prices. In Europe cement sales fell by 3.1% to 7.7Mt due to slowing construction growth in the UK despite improvements in France and Switzerland. In Latin America cement sales fell by 10.7% to 6Mt mainly due to problems in Brazil. In the group’s Middle East Africa region cement sales rose by 3.1% to 10.8Mt led by Algeria, Egypt and Nigeria. Finally, in North America sales of cement grew by 18.9% to 3.4Mt boosted by a ‘vigorous’ housing market.
“The first quarter is not indicative of our full year performance. We are on track with our plan and we see favourable underlying trends,” said chief executive officer Eric Olsen in a statement. The multinational construction materials producer intends to keep to its 2018 targets announced in November 2015. It will do this through holding down costs, continuing its Euro3.16bn divestment programme and increasing benefit from synergies following the merger of Lafarge and Holcim in 2015.