Russia/Kazakhstan/Ireland: Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska is holding talks to discuss selling up to 75% of his cement production company BaselCement to Ireland's Cement Roadstone Holdings (CRH). BaselCement CEO Vyacheslav Shmatov and CRH's press office declined to comment.
At present, BaselCement only has two operating facilities, one in Russia and the other in Kazakhstan. The company's plant in the Krasnoyarsk city of Achinsk produced 436,500t of cement in January to July 2011, up from 150,400t that it produced in the same period of 2010. BaselCement's plant in Kazakhstan produced 400,000t of cement in the whole of 2010.
The proposed deal could also include two cement plants with a combined annual production capacity of 3.5Mt/yr that are currently being built in the Ryazan and Novgorod regions. CRH has preliminarily estimated BaselCement's value at Euro550-600m (excluding its subsidiary BaselCement-Pikalyovo). BaselCement is forecast to have a net profit of Euro45.8m in 2011.
