August 2025

Ethiopia: Abay Industrial Development has ordered a new 5000t/day cement plant worth Euro100m from Denmark’s FLSmidth. The plant will be built near Dejen. FLSmidth has received a down payment for the project but it will not be added to its order intake until further conditions have been met.

The order includes design and engineering, full equipment supply, automation systems, installation and commissioning as well as training and extended supervision. Completion of the order is expected during the second quarter of 2022.

Ghana: Morten Gade, the managing director of Ghacem, says that the company plans to make 3Mt of cement in 2019. It also has a target of producing and distributing 60 million bags compared to 56 million bags, according to the Daily Graphic newspaper. The subsidiary of Germany’s HeidelbergCement operates two grinding plants in the country.

South Africa: The Competition Tribunal has resumed hearings into allegations of cartel-like behaviour by Natal Portland Cement (NPC), Pretoria Portland Cement Company (PPC), Lafarge Industries South Africa (Lafarge) and AfriSam Consortium (AfriSam). It follows a referral by the Competition Commission following an investigation in 2015 that examined collusive conduct between the cement companies between 2008 and 2012. At the time PPC was granted conditional leniency and AfriSam and Lafarge settled with the Commission.

Papua New Guinea: Australia’s Mayur Resources has completed a feasibility report looking into building an integrated cement plant near Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. The cement and lime plant project has an estimated cost of US$331m. It will produce 1.65Mt/yr of clinker, be able to grind 0.9Mt/yr of cement and produce 0.2Mt/yr of quicklime. The study also found that the project area had reserves of 78Mt of limestone and 14Mt of maiden mineral resource that could support the project for 30 years.

The company is now arranging compensation agreements with the local community and submitting a mining lease application. Award of engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) design and engineering contracts, finalise product offtake and project financing arrangements are scheduled for the second half of 2019.

India: UltraTech Cement’s income rose by 17% year-on-year to US$3.73bn in the nine months to the end of 2018 from US$3.18bn in the same period in 2017. Its net profit fell by 21% to US$197m from US$250m. The main causes for this were rising power, energy and logistics costs. Despite this, income and net profit rose in the third quarter of the year. The cement producer also completed its acquisition of Binani Cement in the third quarter.

Fiji: The Tasman Sea, a bulk carrier, has delivered clinker from Japan for the Tengy Cement plant via the port of Lautoka. The vessel carried 26,800t of clinker, according to the Fiji Sun newspaper. It will also deliver clinker for Tengy Cement’s plant in Suva. Madulesh Lakhan, operations manager of Transam Fiji, said that his company arranges clinker imports every three months to the country. Pacific Cement also uses the service.

Russia: Iskitimcement’s sales fell in 2018 due to a poor local market in Siberia and a drop in domestic exports to the Ural Federal District. Its cement sales fell by 2.2% year-on-year to 1Mt in 2018. Clinker production grew by 4.8% to 0.88Mt.

Spain: LafargeHolcim España has restored land at a quarry near its Jerez de la Frontera cement plant in Cadiz. As part of biodiversity improvement project it has recovered 45 hectares of land and planted around 35,000 trees.

Ireland/UK: Quinn Cement has extended its exclusive supply agreement for Master Grade Cement in the UK with National Buying Group (NBG). Quinn Cement’s Master Grade Cement product will continue to be solely available to merchants in the UK via NBG following a deal originally made in 2018.

“Our partnership with NBG has been very successful in 2018 with our Master Grade Cement sales in particular exceeding forecasts since we launched our new cement range. Feedback from NBG merchants has been very positive and demand continues to grow, so we’re delighted to agree an extension to our exclusivity deal with the Group,” said Quinn Cement’s GB Sales and Marketing Director Lee Gillman. He added that 2018 had been a ‘strong’ year for the cement producer.

The Bangladeshi cement industry has been busy over the last month. Both Vietnam and Iran have marked up the country as a major destination for their exports. No change there, but Saudi Arabia has also started to join them as its producers have started announcing clinker export deals to the country. Alongside this there have also been production upgrades announced from MI Cement, Chhatak Cement and a Saudi-led partnership. Also, just before Christmas, Shah Cement inaugurated the world’s largest vertical roller mill (VRM) with a 8.1m grinding table, supplied by Denmark’s FLSmidth, at its Muktarpur plant in Munshiganj.

Md Shahidullah, vice president of the Bangladesh Cement Manufacturers Association (BCMA), described 2018 as a good year for the local industry to local media. Cement sales rose to 33Mt and consumption grew by 12% year-on-year.

The country has an integrated production capacity of 8.4Mt/yr from eight plants according to Global Cement Directory data. The main plants are Chhatak Cement and Lafarge Surma Cement. Locally produced clinker accounts for about 20% of the country’s needs, with the other 80% imported from abroad. Hence, the action is really with the grinding plants and the country has over 30 of them. A market report by EBL Securities in mid-2017 reckoned that local cement production capacity was 40Mt/yr but that actual production was around 32Mt in the 2016 - 2017 reporting year due to problems with power supplies and so on. Given the focus on grinding it’s interesting to note imports of clinker. These rose by 9% year-on-year to a value of US$518m in 2017 - 2018, the highest figure since 2014 - 2015. Not all of this may be consumption related since the local currency, the Taka, depreciated against the US dollar in 2017 and 2018.

Back in 2016 the market leaders were Shah Cement, LafargeHolcim Bangladesh, Bashundhara Group, Seven Rings Cement and HeidelbergCement. They accounted for about half of the market share. Of these LafargeHolcim Bangladesh saw its revenue nearly double year-on-year to US$101m from US$58m in the first half of 2018. Its profit did double to US$6.3m from US$2.7m. The company is a joint venture between LafargeHolcim, Spain’s Cementos Molins and other partners.

Bangladesh suits a grinding-based industry due to its high level of navigable waterways and low levels of limestone. In some respects though the country is a glimpse of what future cement markets might look like. Its lack of raw materials means it focuses on grinding and a clinker-rich world plays right into this. This creates an oversaturated market full of lots of companies due to the lower cost of setting up a grinding business or cement trading. In theory this should be great for end consumers and the general development of the country. After all Bangladesh has a high population, of 164 million, and a low gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, US$4561, and similarly low per capita consumption of cement. The downside though is that reliance on external raw materials. Any changes to exchange rates or material supply puts the entire industry at risk or puts prices in flux. In the meantime though the interest by Saudi exporters adds an interesting dynamic to a crowded market.