LafargeHolcim took what appeared to be a surprising decision this week when it announced it was buying roofing and building envelope producer Firestone Building Products (FSBP). The deal raises eyebrows because it seems to be a departure from the building material producer’s previous dedication to its three major pillars: cement, aggregates and ready-mixed concrete. Yet, it follows the logic of sticking to safer markets both geographically and in terms of sustainability.

First some background. Originally, Global Cement was following the auction for FSBP via its sister publication Global Insulation. Reporting from Bloomberg in December 2020 focused on more obvious bidders such as Ireland-based insulation producer Kingspan and roofing products producer Standard Industries. However, Kingspan has been struggling publicly with fallout from the Grenfell Tower fire inquiry in the UK. Despite not formally supplying any of its products for the tower block in London, it has become embroiled in the allegations of a general culture of cheating safety tests for foam board-based insulation products. At the almost the same time that it dropped out of the FSBP bidding, its chief executive officer (CEO) Gene Murtagh apologised for ‘process shortcomings’ that had been highlighted by the ongoing inquiry. Make of this what you will. No word on why Standard Industries left proceedings but it also seems to part of a consortium trying to take over US-based chemical producer WR Grace. All of this is relevant because, from publicly-available sources, LafargeHolcim appeared to emerge out of nowhere to snaffle up FSBP. However, it seems ludicrous that a company with a revenue of around Euro25bn in 2019 could simply pull something like Euro2.8bn out of its pocket at the last minute. It’s likely it was quietly in the bidding process the whole time.

Back in the early 2010s Lafarge was busy selling off its major ‘non-core’ assets like its gypsum business in the wake of picking up debts from acquisitions like cement-producer Orascom in the Middle East. This then turned into a string of divestments following the merger with Holcim to try and shore up the business along with a general pivot towards concrete as the key end-product as sustainability concerns gathered pace. Producing cement remains a major part of LafargeHolcim’s business but a focus on the whole lifecycle of concrete is vital as a hedge against the high process emissions associated with making clinker. Cement factories run the risk of becoming so-called stranded assets depending on future government regulations.

In its acquisition statement LafargeHolcim played up the sustainability credentials of buying FSBP. It noted that up to 60% of buildings’ energy is lost through roofs and that FSBP’s products help to reduce this. Then it made the link that FSBP’s technologies and products complement LafargeHolcim’s sustainable building solutions like its ECOPact green concrete and its EcoLabel sustainable product range. Later, when LafargeHolcim CEO Jan Jenisch spoke to US broadcaster CNBC he described the move as a ‘perfect fit’ for his company’s goal, “to be the most sustainable and most innovative building materials supplier in the future.” The geographical point of the acquisition hasn’t been dwelt on as much as sustainability but no doubt buying a business based in the US with revenue of US$1.8bn is seen as being far safer than buying, say, a similar concern in East Asia.

Investing in a business that sells products that reduce energy loss in the building envelope follows the trend of the moving sustainability-related risk along the supply chain from cement to concrete and beyond. Ultimately consumers will have to pick up the true carbon price of their buildings, but if building materials producers buy more of the envelope they can spread this cost more thinly and hopefully build up the market in the process. One can also imagine it fitting with the mindset of CEO Jan Jenisch, the former boss of Sika, a company that sells speciality chemicals across a wide range of markets. The real test here is whether LafargeHolcim will buy more companies in the wider building materials sector or if other heavy building materials producers will copy them. If so then the days of heavy building material producers sticking to the three pillars of cement, aggregates and concrete may be numbered.

Could the fairy tale of McInnis Cement have ended any other way? The saga of the frequently frozen cement plant in Quebec collided with reality this week when it emerged that the pension fund Caisse de depot et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and the provincial government are poised to let it go. The new buyer, Votorantim Cimentos, plans to form a new 83%-owned subsidiary based in Toronto to combine the assets of McInnis Cement and St Marys Cement. The proposed change in management marks a transition to a large multinational building materials producer.

Normally, Global Cement Weekly would end on a summary for its last outing of the year but the government involvement in the McInnis Cement’s ownership has created a very public tale of hope and hubris. Attempting to build a brand new integrated cement plant in rural Quebec might not seem exciting but this story has it all, from corporate competition to sustainability issues to clinker export markets. Readers looking for a global recap of 2020 should refer to the December 2020 issue of Global Cement Magazine with news and cement producer round-ups.

The McInnis story began in early 2014 when the Quebec provincial government announced that it would invest US$350m in a new 2.2Mt/yr cement plant and port facility to be operated by McInnis Cement at Port-Daniel. The project was championed by the Beaudoin-Bombardier family, which was to foot the larger share of the US$1bn total bill. Local press compared the gambit of entering a new market with established players as being similar to Bombardier's approach to its C Series airliner that was eventually bought out by Airbus: risky but potentially lucrative.

As the plan developed, competitors in both Canada and the US took exception to an export-focused cement plant being propped up by government money, political parties got involved over how public money was being spent and environmentalists became upset. The concerns of the latter were partially bypassed in order to get the project started. Then, when the cost over-ran by US$350m, the provincial government said it wasn’t spending any more and the CDPQ took over. The plant was inaugurated in September 2017 and the CDPQ started looking for a buyer or new investors at the start of 2018. It rowed back from this position in early 2019 when its chief executive officer told local press that the pension and insurance fund was ‘convinced’ of the potential of McInnis Cement. Votorantim was publicly linked to the company in September 2020 and the agreement followed this week.

It’s unknown how much Votorantim has paid to buy control of McInnis Cement but its presence in the Great Lakes region and the east coast will be augmented by this deal. Following the acquisition it will control two integrated plants and two grinding plants in the Midwest US, two integrated plants in Ontario, and now the McInnis integrated plant in Quebec. The combined integrated production capacity will rise to around 7Mt/yr. Things are looking up for the company with the Brazilian market recovering despite coronavirus and the US market holding steady so far in 2020.

The drama of McInnis Cement highlights the perils of state investment in heavy industry and the pitfalls of making a risky entry into a saturated market. The bit the Votorantim press release neglected to mention was the loss that the provincial government of Quebec is expected to make on its involvement with the cement plant. Instead it was left to Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon to admit to journalists that the province is prepared to lose up to US$370m on the affair if it can’t recoup its costs after other creditors take their slices over the next decade or so. One consolation that was reported in the local press was that jobs and facilities at the McInnis plant would be supported until at least 2029. The story of the cement plant at Port-Daniel continues for now but it’s likely to be far less public as private companies take it into the unknown.

Global Cement Weekly will return on 6 January 2020

One of the last news stories we covered before the Christmas break was that Lafarge Poland had selected China-based Nanjing Kisen International Engineering as the general contractor for a Euro100m-plus upgrade to its Małogoszcz cement plant. This appears to be the first major European cement plant upgrade project to be publicly run by a Chinese contractor. There may be other European projects in the sector run by Chinese companies ‘on the down-low.’

If it is the first then this is a significant milestone for the growth of the Chinese industry. It is a noteworthy first for Nanjing Kisen in the European Union. Europe is the home, after all, of a number of locally-based contractors and companies that can build or upgrade cement plants including FLSmidth, Fives, ThyssenKrupp, IKN and others. Indeed, all of the work on this project might actually be conducted by local companies, selected by the general contractor. For example, Lafarge Poland says that the general contractor will select a subcontractor on the Polish market.

It’s easy to fall into jingoistic nostalgia but should we really be surprised that China can competitively build cement plants given the ferocious growth of its own industry over the last few decades? Arguments by Western critics against growing Chinese dominance in industry have tended to home in on excuses why they might be ‘cheating’ such as intellectual property theft, unfair state aid or the use of low-cost infrastructure loans to countries along its Belt and Road Initiative. That last one carries some irony given that not so long ago discussions about developing world debt were framed in the context of the Cold War and the oil crisis in the 1970s. Western countries were seen as the bogeymen depending on one’s political outlook. With this in mind, the Financial Times recently reported on data released in December 2020 that suggested that China might be heading into its own overseas debt crisis. The takeaway message here is that attempting to apply China’s whopping infrastructure boom elsewhere might not work so well without the same level of control. Exporting production overcapacity abroad may simply turn out to be something like a giant Ponzi scheme! For the cement industry this may mean a pause or wind-down in the number of new plants backed by Chinese money, often with Chinese contractors tied in, and that the rise of Chinese engineering firms might not seem as unassailable as all that after all.

This leads into another noteworthy story that we also published before Christmas on China’s latest proposal to further reduce production capacity at home. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) wants to tighten the ratio of production capacity that has to be closed before new capacity can be built from 1.25:1 to 1.5:1. The kicker is that the new rules also include a clause intended to restrict the use of so-called ‘zombie’ capacity in the swapping process by limiting eligibility to productions lines that have been operated for two or more consecutive years since 2013. These rules seem targeted at the present day but they could potentially push Chinese cement production capacity per capita to rates more similar to those found in developed economies elsewhere (i.e. halve existing Chinese production capacity). Many of the country’s kilns were built in the early 2000s and the average lifespan of a clinker kiln is 50 years. This suggests that the ministry is thinking seriously about culling capacity by the administration’s carbon neutrality target of 2060.

Chinese penetration in the European cement plant market is more of an after-thought given the pace of projects in Asia and Africa over the last decade and the maturity of the sector. It can also be misleading given that some very-European-sounding engineering companies are actually owned by Chinese concerns. Yet no doubt local contractors and suppliers would like to keep any business they can. On the other hand, more market share may be found in Europe over the coming decades from retrofitting CO₂ mitigating equipment or building the anticipated hydrogen revolution once the regulatory and financial framework starts to favour it. Or maybe shifts to service and/or machine intelligence-style packages are the way forward. Nanjing Kisen may be the first Chinese company to upgrade a European cement plant but the market focus may quickly move on. Time will tell.

Answers by email for when readers think the first cement plant or production line in the US will be built by a Chinese company.

Happy New Year from Global Cement

Manoj Kumar Rustagi was on hand yesterday to discuss JSW Cement’s operations in the UAE at the Virtual Middle Eastern Cement Conference. At the event, jointly organised by Global Cement Magazine and the Arab Union for Cement and Building Materials (AUCBM), Rustagi mainly stuck to the development of the producer’s new integrated plant in the Fujairah Free Zone but he also gave an overview of JSW Cement’s presence in India. For example, as part of an industrial conglomerate, JSW Group, the cement producer benefits from links to steel production by JSW Steel that enables it to use blast furnace slag. Notably, JSW Cement’s Shiva Cement subsidiary announced plans at the end of November 2020 to spend around US$200m on a new 1.4Mt/yr integrated cement plant in Sundergarh district, Odisha with the clinker production line supplied by ThyssenKrupp Industries India.

JSW Cement is not alone in ordering new production capacity. This week, UltraTech Cement approved a planned increase of 12.87Mt/yr for around US$740m. This is in addition to new capacity projects of 6.7Mt/yr that are currently underway. All of these new projects are scheduled to be commissioned in a phased manner by the end of the 2023 Indian financial year (by March 2023). It is unclear at present how exactly these projects are distributed but they are centred in the Northern, Central and Western Zones of the country, and the new tranche includes the previously announced Pali plant in Rajasthan. At this price the inference is that the much of the new capacity will be in the form of grinding plants and/or upgrades to existing clinker lines. Around the same time as this, LafargeHolcim said it wants to spend US$112m on waste heat recovery (WHR) plants for six of its cement plants in India by the end of 2022.

Graph 1: Change in Indian cement production year-on-year (%). Source: Office of the Economic Adviser.

These three projects by major producers suggest that the Indian cement sector is recovering from the effects of the coronavirus lockdown in late March 2020. Graph 1 above shows the sector finally recovering in October 2020, with growth of 3% year-on-year to 26.9Mt. Kumar Mangalam Birla, the chairman of Aditya Birla Group, credited the economic situation with the Indian government’s Atmanirbhar Bharat stimulus program for his decision to commit to UltraTech Cement’s spending spree. This outlook gels with that of Fitch Ratings. The credit ratings agency has forecast in a recent report that ‘strong’ margins during the first half of the 2021 financial year (April – September 2020) are going to limit the financial risks to the larger Indian cement companies despite the lower cement sales volumes due to coronavirus. Pent-up demand helped the industry recover after the lockdown and this was further aided by lower energy/fuel costs and general cost cutting.

Needless to say all of the above is good news for the Indian cement industry after the year it has had. One thought to consider from all of this is who might UltraTech Cement order its mills and clinker lines from? Atmanirbhar, the name of the Indian stimulus plan, has been described as ‘self-reliance’ or ‘self-sufficiency’ in the local press. Unfortunately, relations have been poor between India and China in 2020 due to armed skirmishes along the Line of Actual Control on the border, amongst other issues. Ordering a new clinker production line from, say China-based Sinoma, may not look especially ‘self-sufficient’ in the current climate.

The proceedings pack and video from the Virtual Middle Eastern Cement Conference 2020 is availabe to buy now