Analysis

Holcim Mexico has been promoting itself as the lynchpin of the group’s growth in Latin America this week. The move makes sense following the spin-off of Holcim’s North America business in late June 2025. The company says that Mexico has a housing deficit, has the highest profitability margin in Latin America and it is leading the transformation toward circular and low-carbon construction.

The bullseye on Latin America was first planted by Holcim in the group’s NextGen Growth 2030 strategy that was released in March 2025. With the company preparing to separate off its most profitable section in the US, it decided to highlight new reasons for investors to stay interested. The summary was ‘focused investment’ in attractive markets in Latin America, Europe, North Africa and Australia, sustainability-driven growth with demolition materials singled out and an emphasis on the building solutions division. Although the Latin America division supplied the smallest geographical share of new group net sales in 2024 (US$3.9bn, 19%), the profitability metric presented, recurring earnings before interest and taxation (EBIT) margin, gave the region the highest result. Or in other words, Holcim is telling investors that it may have divested North America but it still has business south of the Rio Grande… and it looks promising. It then said that it has the ‘best’ geographical coverage and vertical integration in the region and the largest construction materials retail franchise in the form of Disensa.

Understandably, the likes of Cemex, Cementos Argos, Votorantim and others might take exception to some of this. For example, Cemex reported net sales in excess of US$6bn in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Votorantim reported net sales of around US$4.8bn in 2024. Yet, Holcim’s claim of regional spread does carry some weight. It purchased Comacsa and Mixercon in Peru and assets from Cemex in Guatemala in 2024. At the end of the year the group owned integrated cement plants in Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru. Plus it held grinding plants in the French Antilles and Nicaragua. All of these are majority-owned subsidiaries, often also with aggregate, ready-mixed concrete and building systems businesses. Holcim may have sold up in Brazil in 2022 but it still holds a relatively intact network in Latin America.

Graph 1: Grey cement production in Mexico, 2020 - April 2025, rolling 12 months. Source: National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).

As for the market, Holcim reported modest but growing net sales in Latin America in 2024, despite lower sales volumes plus elections in Mexico, economic issues in Argentina and political instability in Ecuador. Focusing on Mexico, local cement volumes were said to be stable, aided by a recovery in bagged cement in spite of bulk sales falling on the back of fewer infrastructure projects. Holcim Mexico also spent US$55m on building a new grinding unit at its integrated Macuspana plant in Tabasco. Once complete, the update will increase the site’s capacity by 0.5Mt/yr to 1.5Mt/yr.

Cemex, the market leader in Mexico, released more direct information. It saw its sales and operating earnings fall in 2024. This was blamed on a poor second half to the year following the presidential election in June 2024. GCC’s sales fell more sharply in 2024 and this was blamed on “energy infrastructure limitations and permitting delays in Juarez.” So far in 2025, in the first quarter, the pain in Mexico for the construction sector has continued, with both Cemex and GCC noting strong falls in cement volumes and sales due to a slowdown in industrial demand. Holcim has not reported on Mexico directly so far in 2025 only saying that sales have risen in local currencies in Latin America as a whole in the first quarter. Cemex started a cost cutting exercise in February 2025 in response to the situation. Graph 1 above shows Mexican cement production. Although it should be noted that Cemex and GCC still run subsidiaries in the US. Holcim now does not. Rolling 12-month cement production figures in Mexico started falling in September 2024 and continued to do so until April 2025, the date of the latest data provided by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography.

Despite falling volumes though, the price of cement in Mexico remains high by international standards. At the start of July 2025 the National Association of Independent Businessmen (ANEI) raised the alarm that distributors had warned of an 8% price rise on the way. It’s in this environment that news stories such as Bolivia-based Empresa Pública de Cementos Bolivia (ECEBOL), a producer in a landlocked and mountainous country, preparing to export clinker to Mexico from July 2025 start to sound credible. Sales may have been down in Mexico in 2024 but earnings and margins remain high. In the medium-to-longer term the country looks even more promising, with plenty of scope for development and building products. Ditto the rest of Latin America.

One way a multinational heavy building materials company with a presence in sustainability-obsessed Europe might gain an advantage in the region is by using its knowledge to capture the easier decarbonisation routes first. This is exactly the route Holcim and Holcim Mexico seem to be taking by promoting lower carbon cement and concrete products, and by growing the recycling of demolition materials. Another option, of course, is that Holcim is bolstering its Latin America division ahead of a potential divestment. Either way, Holcim is presenting a plan for growth in its new form, shorn of North America. It’s all to play for.

Titan Group announced this week that it will build a processing and beneficiating unit for fly ash at Warrington in the UK. The move marks both a trend in fly ash projects in the UK recently and Titan’s own focus in the country.

Titan has struck a deal to use ponded fly ash at the former Fiddler’s Ferry power station in the North-West of England. It aims to process 300,000t/yr of wet fly ash from 2027 onwards with the option to double this capacity if desired. The processed fly ash will meet the BS EN 450 standard for subsequent use in cement or concrete. Crucially, Titan intends to use the technology of its subsidiary, ST Equipment & Technology (STET). This company has a proprietary dry electrostatic process that it uses for fly ash beneficiation. Titan acquired STET in 2002. It says its process is being used at 12 power stations in the US, Canada, the UK, Poland, and South Korea. The project at Fiddler’s Ferry will be the 20th fly ash project developed with STET technology.

Titan has not commented on the specifics of its arrangement with site-owner PEEL Group other than to describe it as a ‘long-term agreement.’ It currently operates a terminal in Hull, on the other side of the country, 160km from Warrington. As for Fiddler’s Ferry, the coal-fired power plant closed in 2020. Prior to this though RockTron Group built a 800,000t/yr unit at Fiddler’s Ferry to process both ‘fresh’ and stockpiled fly ash in the late 2000s. Unfortunately the company entered administration in 2013. Later, Power Minerals was reportedly selling fly ash from the plant at the time that its closure was announced in 2019. A report commissioned by consultants Arcadis for the local council reported that ash including pulverised fuel ash (PFA) was present in the lagoons at the site.

Other companies have also been looking at the fly ash market in the UK. Invicta, a joint venture between Türkiye-based Medcem and Brett Group opened a terminal at Sheerness in Kent in 2024 to import PFA and cement. In April 2025 a ship unloader supplied by Van Aalst was delivered to the port. Then in May 2025 it was announced that Mecem is planning to build a terminal in Liverpool to import cement and supplementary cementitious materials (SCM), such as fly ash and granulated blast furnace slag. The terminal will have a combined storage capacity of 45,000t in four silos in its initial phase and is scheduled for completion in mid-2026. Meanwhile, the Drax power station said in March 2025 that it had signed a 20-year joint venture agreement with Power Minerals to process legacy PFA. A unit at the now biomass power plant in Yorkshire is scheduled to start by the end of 2026 with an initial production capacity of 400,000t/yr.

The background to this interest in fly ash in the UK appears to be a local cement sector struggling with high energy costs and low capacity-utilisation rates. Reports in local media in late June 2025 cited preliminary estimates that cement output may have reached an ‘all-time low’ in 2024. High electricity prices were blamed for the situation by the Mineral Products Association (MPA) and it warned of mounting imports from the EU and North Africa. All of this was timed to coincide with a release of a new Industrial Strategy by the UK government. For more on the UK cement sector in general see Global Cement Weekly in May 2025 and Edwin Trout’s feature in the June 2025 issue of Global Cement Magazine.

Readers will be aware of the growing attractiveness of SCMs for cement and concrete production for both cutting costs and meeting sustainability goals. A report by McKinsey on SCMs for the cement sector in late 2024 forecast that SCMs and fillers in Europe could represent an emerging value pool that could reach €8 – 10bn in 2035 as the price of cement steadily rises. The SCMs being used are likely to change as sources of industrial SCMs such as slag and ash dwindle and others such as clays, pozzolans or limestone become more available. The UK may have closed its last coal-powered power plant in 2024 but ash from ponds can still be reclaimed or ash can be imported if the economics makes sense. Recent investments by Titan, Medcem and Power Minerals suggest that the price is indeed right. The interest of two major cement exporting companies amongst the three names above also indicates changing market dynamics. Expect more of these kinds of deals and investments in the UK, Europe and elsewhere in coming years.

It’s been a busy period at FLSmidth in Denmark with the announced sale of its Air Pollution Control business this week. This has followed the divestment of its cement business and its headquarters in Valby in late June 2025.

The Denmark-based company has moved towards mining over the last decade. In the mid-2010s, revenue from its cement business was higher than its mining division. This started to change in 2017 when it acquired part of Sandvik Mining Systems. The purchase of ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions’ mining business followed in 2021. The focus on mining then became more overt with the announcement of so-called “pure play strategies” for its mining and cement divisions in 2023. The public decision to sell the cement business came in early 2024. That year the cement division contributed about one fifth of group order intake, revenue and earnings. For more on the background to the decision to divest read Global Cement Weekly’s commentary in January 2024.

US-based private equity company Pacific Avenue Capital Partners was revealed as the buyer for the cement division on 20 June 2025. The value of the deal was presented as a total initial consideration of €75m and a further conditional deferred cash consideration of up to €75m. This latter payment appears to be based on undisclosed criteria. The cement division reported revenue of €596m and adjusted earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of €54m in 2024. The divestment is expected to close in the second half of 2025 subject to the regulatory approval and so on.

However, other sales connected to FLSmidth’s cement business have also been occurring. A deal to sell its Non-Core Activities segment to KOCH Solutions was announced in June 2023. This includes a mixture of intellectual property for port and terminal equipment, stockyard systems and pipe conveyors. It also covers order backlog, employees and facilities. No purchase price has been revealed. Completion was originally planned for the end of 2024 but it has been put back to the end of 2025. In July 2023 the sale of its Advanced Filtration Technologies (AFT) filter media business to Micronics was declared. No price for the divestment was disclosed but a net gain of around €13m was reported in the company’s annual report.

Jump forward to 2024 and the divestment of MAAG gears and drives was swiftly announced and then completed in the first quarter to Sweden-based investment company Solix Group. As before no price was publicised but a net gain of around €3.75m was reported. Now, in 2025, the group signed a deal to sell its headquarters at Valby in Denmark for around €98m. The company has been based in the town since 1899 and the building in question at Vigerslev Allé was inaugurated in 1956. The company is planning to move to a new headquarters in Copenhagen later in 2025. This week the sale of its Air Pollution Control business to UK-based investors Rubicon Partners has been announced. It said that since 2020 the company has gradually been divesting businesses related to air pollution control. This latest sale is the last part of that process.

So that appears to be it for FLSmidth’s involvement in the cement sector beyond the quarry gates. The divestments have occurred in a piecemeal fashion rather than one single outright transaction. The Non-Core Activities and Advanced Filtration Technologies (AFT) segments are being sold to manufacturers. By contrast MAAG gears and drives, the Air Pollution Control business and the remainder of the cement business are being sold to investment companies. We’ll have to wait a few years to work out the implications of all of this.

It’s not every week that a ‘new’ cement producer gains hold of nearly 30Mt/yr of production capacity.¹ Back in 2022, a few readers studying the North America pages of the year’s Global Cement Directory probably wondered “Where’s Lafarge gone?” following the dissolution of the France-based producer’s corporate identity into Holcim in June 2021. Now, in the upcoming Global Cement Directory 2026, readers will be able to search in vain for another name among the cement maps of Canada and the US – that of Holcim itself. A decade on from the completion of the Lafarge/Holcim merger, the combination of the two in North America has precipitated something entirely new: Amrize.

On 23 June 2025, Amrize assumed the entire business of Canada and US market leader Holcim North America, following its successful spin-off from Switzerland-based Holcim. Amrize occupies its predecessor’s operational headquarters in Chicago, US, with registered offices in Zug, Switzerland, and is dual-listed in the US and Switzerland.² For those interested in finance, shares in Amrize debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in the US at US$50. Meanwhile on the SIX Swiss Exchange, they dropped by 13% from reference price, to US$49.30, while those in its erstwhile parent rose by 14%.

Table 1 (below) gives the relative size of the entities, based on their latest published figures and the Global Cement Directory 2025. Amrize and Holcims’ respective percentages of the former Holcim total are given in brackets:

Metric                                     Amrize                        Rump Holcim            TOTAL

Integrated cement plants     18 (17%)                     88 (83%)                     106

Capacity                                 28.7Mt/yr (11%)          224.9Mt/yr (89%)        253.6Mt/yr

Employees                             19,000 (29%)              46,000 (71%)              65,000                        

Revenues                               US$7.85bn (24%)       US$24.95 (76%)         US$32.8bn

Amrize chair and CEO Jan Jenisch stated the company’s aims in a post to LinkedIn: to be partner of choice for the US$2tn/yr North American construction sector, to deliver ‘advanced’ materials ‘from foundation to rooftop’ and to serve customers in every province and state.³ This paraphrases Amrize’s Five Strategic Drivers: 100% North America focus; unparalleled footprint and resources; value creation; unlocking growth and driving shareholder value. The menu on the company website offers not ‘products,’ but ‘solutions,’ categorised by type of construction. For cement, users can navigate to Our Businesses > Building Materials > Cement.⁴ Behind this new messaging, the Canadians and Americans who rely on Amrize’s cement business might like to know what exact role cement will play.

Holcim’s global cement revenues first fell below 50% of group sales in 2024, at US$16.4bn (49%). In North America, its recent acquisitions include both those within the cement value chain (British-Columbia based Langley Concrete Group in June 2025) and outside it (OX Engineered Products in November 2024).

Amrize is organised into Building Materials (cement, concrete, aggregates and asphalt) and Building Envelope (insulation, roofing, sealants and weatherproofing). It operates in five regions: Central (Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and inland US west of the Mississippi, from Missouri to Nevada northward), Great Lakes (Ontario and the US Midwest), Northeast (Quebec, Nova Scotia and the eastern US from Maryland northward), Pacific (British Columbia, California, Oregon and Washington) and South (southern US, west to Arizona, and Ohio).

Setting aside its extensive grinding and logistics infrastructure, the geographical footprint of North America’s largest cement producer breaks down as follows:

Region            Integrated cement plants     Capacity

Central           4                                              9.8

South              5                                              7.6

Northeast       5                                              5.5

Great Lakes   3                                              4.7

Pacific            1                                              1.1

TOTAL            18                                            28.7

Four of these geographies – all except South – are transnational. This at a time when Canada and the US are diverging in industrial policy and engaged in a trade war… Supposedly, regional directors will be juggling ambitious projects like Amrize’s on-going Bath, Ontario, and Richmond, British Columbia, carbon capture projects in Canada with a complement of lower-cost strategies in the US.

Just as important for the future of the company is the team in charge. Leadership is structured similarly to Holcim, with some names even reprising the same role. Chair and CEO Jan Jenisch previously chaired Holcim from May 2023, and was its CEO between September 2023 and April 2024. Jenisch first joined Holcim from Switzerland-based Sika, where he had been CEO, in 2017. He obtained his Master’s of Business Administration degree from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, though Jenisch is in fact a German national.

Ian Johnston steps into the Amrize chief financial officer (CFO) position. A long-time Lafarge and Holcim mover in North America, he holds an accountancy degree from the University of Ottawa in Canada. Building Materials division president Jaime Hill came up through the Holcim corporate structure in the group’s Latin America region, including stints as CEO of Holcim Colombia in 2015 – 2019 and Holcim Mexico in 2019 – 2024, before entering the North American region as regional head in September 2024. However, his familiarity with the region goes back to his completion of a bachelor’s in Business Administration, Management and Marketing at Georgetown University in Washington, US.

Nollaig Forrest was Holcim’s chief sustainability officer (CSO) in September 2023 – June 2025; Amrize doesn’t have one. Instead, Forrest moves across to the chief marketing and corporate affairs officer spot. It’s possible that her intended role had a larger sustainability component during planning in 2024, that might have been struck off after US President Donald Trump withdrew his country from the Paris Accords and suspended, then withdrew, new decarbonisation funding. If this is correct, then Amrize may be giving strategic primacy to the larger US over Canada. Whatever the case, its enormous undertakings towards reaching net zero in Canada do not appear to have a dedicated champion on the leadership team. Forrest is another European, and brings leadership experience at chemicals companies Firmenich, Dow and Dupont and the World Economic Forum, grounded in a master’s in International Relations from the Geneva Graduate Institute in her home country of Switzerland.

Also of interest is Patrick Cleary, who steps up as senior vice president commercial cement for the US, and previously worked with Holcim US and LafargeHolcim US in Chicago. Only cement has a dedicated commercial director at this level, and then only in the US. Meanwhile, Samuel Poletti will serve as chief strategy and mergers and acquisitions. He was previously Holcim’s head of mergers and acquisitions since July 2018, before which time he was high up in the group’s South Asia subregion, including serving as Ambuja Cements’ head of strategy and commercial development in India. Poletti, presumably, will be responsible for sustaining the inorganic growth of the Holcim North America era. The flip side of this strategy for Holcim was flash market exits, including from Brazil, Zimbabwe and India in 2022. Insofar as there is a pattern to Holcim’s geographical realignment, it may be towards growth in ‘mature markets’ – a description to which all of Amrize’s regions conform. Ultimately, Amrize is a whole different company to Holcim. Whatever strategy the team is going in with, there is likely to be a transition phase and time needed to feel things out.

Overall, the Amrize leadership displays a thorough grounding in the Holcim way of doing things and a record of responsibility in a variety of its markets. Above them sits the board, with Nicholas Gangestad beside chair Jan Jenisch as lead independent director. Amrize’s 10-seat board includes four (40%) women: Theresa Drew, Holli Ladhani, Katja Roth Pellanda and Maria Cristina Wilbur.

Amrize has arisen. What makes the spin-off so interesting, besides its unprecedented scale, is the strangeness of the market into which it emerges. Spin-off plans went public in January 2024, at a time when the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) were set to unleash over US$1.9tn in additional public spending into the medium-term future. This is not now going to happen. Yet Amrize’s new website proclaims that “The US and Canada are modernising their infrastructure” for ‘greater efficiency and resilience.’ Of course, building materials consumption will continue in other forms, but the level of visibility is less than ideal. One of Holcim’s partner start-ups, Sublime Systems, appeared on a government list on 30 May 2025 and lost US$87m funding at a stroke.

As for Holcim, it enters the second half of the 2020s in a different shape to that in which it began the decade. Only the geographical signature of its North and West African and Latin American subsidiaries (as well as in Bangladesh and the Philippines) confirm this European producer as having once been the closest thing ever to a global cement hegemon. Holcim’s Latin American holdings look distinctly peripheral without the multi-megatonne bookends of Holcim Brazil and, now, Holcim US.

Amrize inherits an environmental, social and governance (ESG) apparatus from Holcim that suits Canada but is now inappropriate for the US. It has chosen to strip out sustainability from its corporate structure, messaging and Strategic Drivers. The wisdom of this decision can only be measured in the longer term. On the other hand, Amrize’s efforts to mitigate its impacts may continue quietly, in a kind of reverse greenwashing – ‘brownwashing’? – until political conditions are suitable to emphasise them once again.

References

1. Global Cement Directory 2025, www.globalcement.com/directory

2. Amrize, ‘Contact Us,’ accessed 25 June 2025, www.amrize.com/us/en/contact-us.html

3. Jan Jenisch, post to LinkedIn, 23 June 2025, www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7342995000399421440/

4. Amrize, ‘Our Cement,’ accessed 25 June 2025, www.amrize.com/us/en/our-businesses/building-materials/cement.html

They’ve done it! Best wishes are due to the Heidelberg Materials Norcem Brevik cement plant and everyone else involved. Today it has officially inaugurated its carbon capture and storage unit. The world’s first full-scale carbon capture facility in the cement industry is live.

The launch of the Longship project has been a two-day affair in Norway hosted by the Norwegian Ministry of Energy, Heidelberg Materials, Northern Lights and other stakeholders. Tuesday 17 June 2025 saw assorted speakers across government and industry, including Heidelberg Materials’ CEO Dominik von Achten, talk about net zero, carbon capture, CO₂ markets and more at the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet in Oslo. Then the event moved to the Brevik cement plant, today on Wednesday 18 June 2025, to inaugurate the project led by HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway. Our editorial director Robert McCaffrey has been in attendance and a full write-up will be available in the September 2025 issue of Global Cement Magazine.

Completing the CCS project at Brevik is undeniably a major achievement. Heidelberg Materials in Norway started seriously thinking about carbon capture in the 2000s and then tested four different potential carbon capture technologies at Brevik in the 2010s. A feasibility study, concept study and a FEED study followed for the use of an amine technology approach. A full-scale capture unit on one of the plant’s two production lines was then approved for funding partly by the Norwegian government in late 2020. Technically this is a gross simplification because the project team at Brevik have worked through the technical challenges of connecting a cement production environment to a petrochemical one. 400,00t/yr of CO₂ has started to be captured at Brevik and transported by ship, as part of the Northern Lights project, for sequestration under the North Sea. Heidelberg Materials then intends to sell a net-zero cement product via carbon capture around Europe called EvoZero using a carbon accounting system to manage it. When Global Cement asked about plans for EvoZero, Von Achten said production of the product is fully sold-out for 2025. “Customers are not the issue,” said von Achten. “Property developers and architects are leading the discussion on the use of EvoZero.” The age of commercially-available cement made using carbon capture has begun.

The Norwegian government estimates that the entire Longship project will cost around Euro2.6bn with Euro1.8bn attributable to the state. The original white paper proposed to the Norwegian parliament estimated that the Norcem project would cost just under Euro400m for construction and 10-years of operation. 84% of this would be paid for by state aid. Northern Lights, the CO₂ transport and storage part of Longship, had an estimated cost of Euro1.2bn, with 73% of this funding attributable to the state. Heidelberg Materials acknowledged the scale of the government grant funding it received in its 2024 financial report. It received Euro110m in government grants in 2024 with Euro77m for the Brevik project and a further Euro21m for a carbon capture, utilisation and storage project in Edmonton, Canada.

As discussed recently in Global Cement Weekly in response to the US government cutting funding for cement carbon capture projects, net zero is a deeply political issue because governments either have to pay for it directly, set-up incentives such as carbon taxes to encourage society to pay for it or ignore it and cope with the consequences. European policy is encouraging these projects so far. However, this is not necessarily the case elsewhere in the world. And governments can change their minds. The rough figures shown above about the cost of Brevik’s carbon capture unit and the costs of moving the CO₂ onwards show how expensive this is.

From here it’s all about building experience on how running an industrial-scale carbon capture operation actually works in the cement sector year in, year out. This will be an exercise across multiple disciplines including engineering, the logistics of CO₂ transportation and sequestration, dealing with state-level partners on a long-term basis and more besides. Many more cement sector carbon capture projects are following in Europe. They will all be eager to learn from the first one in Norway, from both the good and the bad. We will leave the last word to Von Achten from today’s inauguration, "Personally I love the collaboration part of it because this is a masterpiece of national, European, in fact, global collaboration… These days this is important."