Displaying items by tag: Australia

Australia: Boral has appointed Jean-Paul Wallace as its General Counsel and company secretary. He succeeds Peter Lim who held the posts on an interim basis.

Wallace has worked for Australia-based and international law firms. He has also held positions in the engineering and construction sectors for almost 20 years, with General Counsel and company secretary roles at UGL, Tenix and CPB Contractors. He holds an undergraduate degrees in art and law from the University of Sydney and a graduate diploma in corporate governance from the Governance Institute of Australia.

Australia: Construction company SIMPEC, a subsidiary of WestStar, has won a new US$68m contract to work on the on-going expansion of Cockburn Cement’s Kwinana grinding plant. The work involves the construction of two 100t/hr grinding units, a 110,000t raw materials store and a reclamation system. Business News has reported that the total value of the Kwinana grinding plant expansion is US$249 - 272m. Cockburn Cement has committed total investments of US$129m to the project, of which US$7.44m consists of an existing contract with SIMPEC.

SIMPEC managing director Mark Dimasi said "This new contract demonstrates the company's track record of delivering for its clients. We are very pleased to secure this work and are committed to maintaining a long-standing relationship with Cockburn Cement and Adbri. I would like to thank Cockburn Cement for this opportunity to deliver such a high-profile local project and would also like to thank our team for their commitment in helping secure this contract.”

Mark Irwin, CEO of Cockburn Cement’s parent company Adbri said "The balance of work for the agreed scope remains consistent with Adbri's previously announced cost estimate and project schedule for the Kwinana Upgrade Project."

Australia: The Ministry of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water is holding a consultation over the possible implementation of a Cross-Border Adjustment Mechanism to penalise imported cement for its CO₂ emissions in line with the Australian cement industry’s emissions reduction goals. The Guardian Australia newspaper has reported that the government expects to publish its report on the policy in mid-late 2024. The government began implementing new CO₂ emissions limits for Australia’s 200 largest industrial emitters in July 2023. It expects these to eliminate 200Mt-worth of CO₂ emissions over the period up to 2030. Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said “80% of these companies, and 86% of covered emissions, are covered by corporate net zero commitments.” Australia is committed to net zero CO₂ emissions by 2050.

With regard to the proposed Cross-Border Adjustment Mechanism, Bowen said “It’s a potentially important mechanism to ensure domestic sovereign capability and supply. One of the biggest challenges we face is supply-chain crunches, and any measure which helps us deal with that is a positive thing for the transition.”

Australia: Boral’s sales were US$2.28bn in the 2023 financial year, which ended on 30 June 2023. This corresponds to a 38% year-on-year rise from the previous first half. The group’s net profit dropped by 1.3% to US$96.6m. It noted a rise in its costs of energy, labour and transport, which it expects to continue up to the end of June 2024, and possibly on throughout the second half of 2024.

The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper has reported that Australian residential construction activity dropped by 7.7% month-on-month in June 2023. Boral CEO Vik Bansal said that the company expects residential, commercial and civil construction to return to growth in the 2024 financial year.

Australia: James Hardie has published its Sustainability Report 2023, recording its progress towards achieving its sustainability goals up to the end of the 2023 financial year on 31 March 2023. The producer's Scope 1 and 2 CO₂ emissions dropped by 26% compared to 2019 levels, against a new target of a 42% drop by 2030. Environmental product declarations (EPDs) covered 94% of its sales, ahead of a target for the year of 80%. The company launched a new goal to include 30% minority-identified people in its US management.

Chief sustainability officer and vice president, environmental social and governance, Jill Kolling said “Sustainability is a continuous journey, but a necessary one to drive value for our stakeholders, while delivering on our ambition to be a more resilient company. From our boardroom to our manufacturing plants, we are giving sustainability a place at the table to drive meaningful impact and instill accountability across all facets of our organisation.”

Australia: Alternative cement and concrete producers have welcomed a new Australian civil engineering standard that allows builders to use reduced-CO₂ geopolymer concrete in infrastructure projects. Wagners, which produces Earth Friendly Concrete (EFC), said that the revision has removed on if its key barriers to wider market acceptance. EFC replaces 100% of cement with supplementary cementitious materials, including ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) and pulverised fly ash, by virtue of its binder technology. Wagners previously supplied EFC for the London Power Tunnels project in the UK, based on local technical approval-based building codes. The producer now expects a new standard like the Australian one to follow in the EU.

Australia: Cement Australia has commemorated the 100th anniversary of the start of operations at its Railton cement plant in Tasmania with a centenary dinner.

Production manager Garry Bissett said "When it opened up in 1923, they built the small kiln, and it was only capable of cement production of 25,000t/yr; now we're producing 1.4Mt/yr." He added that the workforce has fallen to less than half of its original size of 300 people, to 140. Bissett concluded "We're doing some major work, with a lot of capital upgrades in the near future."

Australia: Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power has concluded a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Hallett Group and renewable energy consultancy Elecseed. Business Korea Daily News has reported that the signatories will collaborate on Hallett Group’s Green Cement Transformation project. The project aims to reduce CO₂ emissions by 300,000t/yr, and eventually by 1Mt/yr, by producing reduced-CO₂ cement from three industrial waste streams. It will also use green hydrogen. The US$83.6m project has US$13m-worth of funding from the government.

Additionally, the partners say that they will seek to foster a ‘globally competitive hydrogen export industry.’

Australia: Adbri has appointed Jared Gashel as its Chief Financial Officer (CFO). He succeeds Dianne Mong, who has held the position of Acting CFO since March 2023. Mong will resume her role as the company’s General Manager Finance.

Gashel holds over 20 years of financial experience in multiple industries. Prior to joining Adbri, he was Acting CFO at Boral from 2022 to March 2023. His previous post at Boral was as Executive General Manager Group Finance and Property. Before joining Boral, he held multiple senior finance executive roles in Australia and Switzerland, and spent more than a decade working for KPMG, where he specialised in advisory and capital markets.

The two largest cement producers in Japan released their results for their 2023 financial years this week. Much like manufacturers elsewhere in the world they reported mounting sales revenues, but they also noted losses. Input prices such as coal rose in 2022 and these were passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. However, this was insufficient to stop them making a loss.

In the case of Taiheiyo Cement, its domestic sales volumes of cement remained stable at 13.4Mt in the year to 31 March 2023. It made a loss at home in Japan but still reported a profit in its overseas businesses, despite export volumes falling by 41% year-on-year to 2.44Mt. The group also noted delays at construction sites due to a lack of workers. Recent domestic developments for Taiheiyo include an agreement in October 2022 to buy the cement business of chemicals company Denka. Outside of Japan, in China, the group suspended the production and sale of cement from its Jiangnan-Onoda Cement subsidiary in February 2023 citing a 'tougher competitive environment,' although it justified this decision as part of its strategy to refocus on Southeast Asia. Then, in late April 2023, the company was forced to stop its proposed acquisition of the Tehachapi cement plant in the US due to an inability to obtain regulatory approval.

Sumitomo Osaka reported a similar situation, with cement sales volumes also down year-on-year. Again, cement price increases were unable to catch coal prices made worse by negative currency exchange effects. Having got the bad news out of the way, it then it took the opportunity to outline its medium term strategy to 2035. It said that becoming carbon neutral was the key to this. In its 2022 financial year cement accounted for around 70% of total sales. However, it is now aiming to reduce this to 65% by 2025 and 50% by 2035. If this sounds familiar this is because it is similar to what Holcim is doing with its growing light building materials division and its diversification away from the heavy building materials trio of cement, concrete and aggregates. Sumitomo Osaka plans to invest over US$3.5bn towards this goal by developing its presence in the semiconductors sector, building its business in Australia and starting new ventures in decarbonisation.

Of the other cement producers, Tokuyama Corporation said in late April 2023 that it was considering suspending operation of one of the three kilns at its 4.54Mt/yr Nanyo cement plant as part of measures to strengthen profitability. It reported a growing loss for the current financial year that it blamed on raw material and fuel costs. Mitsubishi Materials and Ube Industries formed their merged cement businesses in April 2022 known as Mitsubishi UBE Cement Corporation. Ube said, as part of its latest financial results, that, despite a gradual decrease in the domestic market, cement sales had remained stable but that the business was “heavily affected” by rising energy prices such as coal. It added that demand for cement and concrete remain strong in its overseas market in North America.

Graph 1: Sales and exports of cement in Japan from 2013 – 2022. Source: Japan Cement Association.

The Japanese cement market peaked in the 1990s. Domestic sales of cement in Japan have declined over the last decade, as can be seen in Graph 1 above, but at a slower rate. Exports rose to a peak of just under 12Mt in 2017 but have slipped a little since then. Data from the Japan Cement Association placed production at 53.2Mt in 2022 compared to 61.7Mt in 2013. This trend explains the move by the cement producers towards decarbonisation, offshoring, diversification and consolidation. The bump in fuel prices over the past year may have accelerated this process, as examples such as Taiheiyo Cement’s takeover of Denka and Sumitomo Osaka’s new business strategy suggest. The race continues to keep cement production profitable in a changing business environment.