The old joke about buses only coming along in pairs might just apply to Angolan cement plants this week with the inauguration of Nova Cimangola’s new 2.4Mt/yr cement plant in Luanda. It follows the announcement of the start of an upgrade project to build a clinker kiln at Cimenfort’s grinding plant in Benguela. In cement industry terms for a country with a production capacity below 10Mt/yr these projects are right on top of each other!
Nova Cimangola’s new plant has been a well-publicised project internationally. Sinoma International Engineering coordinated the line for US$400m in 21 months using components from well-known suppliers. Loesche provided a number of raw material, cement and coal mills for the project, including the country’s first vertical roller mill, as well as other components and parts. Loesche’s Austrian subsidiary A Tec also got involved as an EPCM (Engineering, Procurement & Construction Management) partner.
Cimenfort’s clinker kiln project is the third phase of a process to turn its grinding plant at Catumbela in Benguela into a fully integrated unit since it opened in 2012. Earlier phases saw the grinding plant’s capacity increase to 1.4Mt/yr from 0.7Mt/yr by using a new roller press. Work on the kiln is now scheduled to start in January 2018 with completion scheduled for 2020.
If Cimenfort makes it to clinker production they will join the country’s three main producers: Nova Cimangola, Fabrica de Cimento do Kwanza Sul (FCKS) and the China International Fund. Getting that far is by no means certain as the Palanca Cement plant project demonstrates. That scheme was backed by Brazil’s Camargo Corrêa, the owners of InterCement, and local business group Gema. However, the regulators bailed out Portugal’s Banco Espírito Santo, the financial backer of the project, in 2014 effectively killing it. Another project that has gone on the back burner is Portugal’s Secil’s plan to build a second plant next to its grinding plant in Lobito. Originally approved by the Angolan government in 2007 the project has been kicked around since then through various revisions to the local investment body. It was last reported as being under consideration by the president’s office of Angola in 2016.
Ministry of Industry figures place cement production capacity at 8.3Mt/yr compared to a consumption of 6Mt/yr. In contrast to this Secil’s parent company Semapa reported that the Angolan cement market contracted in 2016 by 25% to 3.9Mt in line with the poor state of the general economy, pushed down by poor oil prices. It blamed the decrease in cement consumption on a halt in public infrastructure spending and the negative effect that local currency devaluations had on clinker imports and other incoming raw materials. With the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasting economic growth to pick up for Angola in 2017, improvements in the construction and cement sector are expected by Semapa but they hadn’t been seen so far during the first quarter of the year.
The government’s keenness to describe its cement industry as ‘self-sufficient in cement’ mimics calls from other African countries like Nigeria. The Angolan government banned cement imports in 2015, with the exception of certain border provinces, and this has continued into 2017. However, the ban hasn’t stopped the country exporting cement to its neighbours. Earlier this year the head of Cimenterie de Lukala in the Democratic Republic of Congo blamed the closure of his company’s integrated plant on imports from Angola.
All of this leaves an enlarged local cement industry waiting for the good times to come again. In the meantime, exporting cement and clinker no doubt seems like a promising proposition. In the middle of this are projects like those from Cimenfort and Secil that are looking decidedly dicey in the current economic environment. These companies may have just missed the bus to make their upgrades happen. Still, if they wait around long enough, their chance may come again when the market revives.
