Displaying items by tag: Cemex
US: Nine of Cemex USA’s ready-mixed concrete (RMX) plants in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California have earned ISO 14001:2015 certification for their environmental management systems (EMS). The company says these are the first RMX operations in the country to achieve the designation.
The nine plants located in Berkeley, Concord, Oakland, Pleasanton, San Carlos, San Francisco, San Jose, Union City and Santa Clara, California each received certification after Lloyd’s Register, an accredited third-party organisation, audited Cemex USA’s West Region management system at corporate and site level, verifying that it conforms to the standard. In addition to the plants, Cemex USA’s Livermore office also earned the certification.
“Effective environmental management systems are critical in helping our operations meet and exceed our environmental and sustainability goals. By following well-established standards of ISO 14001:2015, our operations can continue to build on their successes while serving as inspiring examples for others to follow across the US,” said Cemex USA president Ignacio Madridejos.
Earlier in 2010 Cemex’s Clinchfield cement plant in Georgia became the first Cemex operation in the US to achieve ISO 14001:2015 certification. The company is currently in the process of achieving the certification at several other of its operations in cement, ready-mix and aggregates across the country.
UK: Cemex has invested around Euro1m on relocating and upgrading its Eversley ready-mixed concrete plant. The new plant will be located at the Bramshill Quarry in Hampshire reducing the need for truck journeys to the fomer site nearby. The unit is being replaced with a Liebherr 2.25 mobile mix plant. The plant will have a storage capacity of 300t of cement, and 240t of aggregates. It will increase production from 80m3/hr to 24m3/hr. The inclusion of a central mixer will also enable special products such as traditional sand cement screed and flowing screeds like Supaflo to be produced, increasing the product range available.
Mexico: Cemex’s sales have fallen in all regions except for Europe. Its net sales fell by 4% year-on-year to US$6.72bn in the first half of 2019 from US$7bn in the same period in 2018. Its operating earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) dropped by 11% to US$1.21bn from US$1.36bn. Cement sales volumes decreased by 9% to 31.3Mt and ready-mixed concrete volumes by 3% to 24.9Mm3.
“The second quarter was impacted by the challenging global economic environment. Weaker-than-expected industrial activity and continued trade conflicts have resulted in lower investment in several of our markets. Mexico in particular has been affected by these factors, which led to lower-than-expected volumes. Adverse weather in the US also translated into muted activity during the quarter. In contrast, we are very pleased with the favourable performance of our Europe region,” said chief executive officer (CEO) Fernando A Gonzalez. He added that earnings were expected to pick up in the second half of the year due to improved government spending in Mexico, higher prices and sales volumes of cement in the US and Europe, stabilising energy prices and the group’s ‘Stronger Cemex plan’.
Caribbean Cement commissions a palletiser
22 July 2019Jamaica: Caribbean Cement has commissioned an automatic palletiser. The project cost around US$66,500, according to the Gleaner newspaper. It is part of a US$9m investment on capital projects in 2019. The cement producer is planning to increase its output to 1.2Mt/yr by December 2020 compared to 0.95Mt/yr at present. The subsidiary of Mexico’s Cemex operates an integrated plant in Kingston.
The race to digitise the cement industry
10 July 2019The big announcement from LafargeHolcim this week was the launch of its Industry 4.0 plan known as ‘Plants of Tomorrow.’ The scheme hopes to use automation technologies and robotics, artificial intelligence, predictive maintenance and digital twin technologies across the company’s entire production process. Operational efficiency gains of 15 - 20% are promised.
There wasn’t much detail beyond the use of the Siggenthal integrated cement plant in Switzerland as the ‘lighthouse’ of the scheme, where around 30 proof-of-concept technology ideas will be tested. One technology it did flesh out a little was its long-running Technical Information System (TIS). This follows the work between Holcim and the power and automation product supplier ABB. LafargeHolcim says that over 80% of its plants around the world use the TIS to provide data transparency at plant, country, regional and global level. It added that some country operations have more than a decade of historic technical data available. This last point is pertinent as the data could potentially be used to support the training of any machine learning algorithms the company might want to invest in. The building materials company also mentioned its LH Maqer subsidiary. This startup incubator was launched at the end of 2018.
LafargeHolcim appears to be playing catch up here with Cemex, which has steadily been promoting its own Industry 4.0 developments in recent years. Emphasis on ‘promotion’ here as only yesterday, the day LafargeHolcim made its big reveal, Cemex happened to release information about a recent roundtable in France that it participated in on digitisation and productivity in the construction sector.
Notably in March 2019, the Mexican multinational struck a deal with Petuum to implement its Industrial AI Autopilot software products for autonomous cement plant operations at its plants around the world in March 2019. Readers can find out more about Petuum’s work with Cemex in the June 2019 issue of Global Cement Magazine. In late 2017 Cemex too set up a division, Cemex Ventures, to engage with startups, universities and other organisations. Cemex has also been building its digital customer integration platform Cemex Go since around the same time.
One interpretation of Industry 4.0 is as a German-industrial approach to the so-called fourth or digital revolution pushed by Anglophone software companies. The idea of taking as much data from a production process, such as making cement, is enticing but the prospect of actually doing something useful with this tsunami of information is daunting. Typically algorithm techniques or predictive maintenance seem so far to focus on discrete parts of a process such as a finish grinding mill or final product logistics networks. Companies like Germany’s Inform focus on the latter for example and, incidentally, it celebrated its 50th anniversary this week.
If automated systems start making apparently nonsensical yet useful decisions across the whole raw materials, production and supply chains, then Industry 4.0 will reach its full potential. This moment, if it comes, will be analogous to the time IBM’s computer Deep Blue managed to beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the late 1990s. What’s more likely are automated systems that can perform consistently outside the human operator comfort zone edging up against hard physical process constraints.
Meanwhile, what will be interesting to watch here is whether LafargeHolcim will be able to leverage any advantage over Cemex by having more cement plants to pull data from. Before LafargeHolcim started selling off its south-east Asian subsidiaries it had more than three times as many cement plants as Cemex. If data really is more valuable than oil these days then starting late in the industrial digital arms race may not be as deleterious as one might first think.
Cemex querying provincial tax in Costa Rica
05 July 2019Costa Rica: Cemex has taken legal action to query a local 5% tax on the sale of cement in the provinces of Cartago, San José and Guanacaste. The issue is commercially relevant because its competitor Cementos Fortaleza operates a grinding plant at Salinas Esparza in Puntarenas where the tax is not liable, according to Diario Extra magazine. Cementos Fortaleza opened its unit in 2018. Cemex operates an integrated and a grinding plant in the country.
France: HeidelbergCement France has finalised the acquisition of Cemex’s Centre region aggregates and ready-mixed concrete businesses. The acquisition includes seven aggregate quarries and 28 ready-mixed concrete plants. The acquired aggregates reserves and resources amount to about 25Mt. HeidelbergCement France will fully integrate the operations into its own network.
“With this acquisition, we strengthen our vertically integrated market position in central France,” said Bernd Scheifele, chairman of the managing board of HeidelbergCement. “The operations fit very well into our existing network of aggregates and ready-mixed concrete plants in the Paris region, and we expect significant synergies.”
US: Cemex has announced that it is supplying concrete, including a specialised self-consolidating mix, along with thousands of tonnes of aggregates for the replacement of the Sixth Street Viaduct Bridge in Los Angeles, California. The original 915m-long bridge, which has served as a backdrop in numerous films, was built in 1932 and is in need of replacement.
Cemex will supply 34,400m3 of ready-mix concrete. This will include 4800m3 of Evolution, Cemex’s range of self-consolidating concrete product that, in this instance, was tailored to fit the bridge’s design and the requirements of the client, CalTrans. Cemex will also supply a fibre-reinforced concrete solution for the bridge deck and structure itself. The US$482m structure, funded by a mixture of state and Federal funds, is expected to open in late 2020.
Mexican sales slide in first quarter
11 June 2019Mexico: According to figures from INEGI, Mexico’s national institute of statistics, sales of cement were worth US$1.21bn during the first quarter of 2019. This figure was 7% lower than during the first quarter of 2018. In volume terms sales fell from 11.89Mt to 10.91Mt, a fall of 8.1% year-on-year.
Market leader Cemex reported a sales fall of 15% in the analysed period despite a price increase of 4%. Cementos Fortaleza, owned by Elementia, posted a sales growth of 1% in terms of value, thanks to rising prices.
Swiss firm LafargeHolcim, through its subsidiary Holcim Apasco, saw total sales shrink by 7.4% in Latin America, with sales of cement falling by 2.6% as a consequence of the demand drop in Mexico and Argentina. Only Cementos Chihuahua registered significant growth, with sales increasing by 8% in during the quarter due to the construction of new industrial buildings and mining projects in the north of the country.
France: Cemex has supplied over 0.3Mm3 of ready-mixed concrete and more than 0.55Mt of aggregates for the Grand Paris Express project over the past three years. It has used mobile on-site concrete plants and a local network of 21 plants in Île-de-France to support the large-scale railway infrastructure scheme.
"The Grand Paris worksites present a daily challenge to deliver ready-mix concrete on time, supply aggregates to our production sites, and move earthworks from the stations and tunnels out of Paris,” said Benjamin Lecendrier, Major Projects Director at Cemex France.
The Grand Paris Express worksites on metro lines 11, 14 and several sections of line 15 South have involved most of Cemex’s staff in the Île-de-France region, with four full-time operatives working in a dedicated unit. Given the scale of operations, logistical organisation is a challenge, with the twin demands of delivering construction materials and removing 40Mt of earthwork by 2030.