September 2025

India: Germany’s Gebr. Pfeiffer has hosted a customer event for the Indian cement industry at Gurugram near New Delhi. The two-day event in late November 2018 consisted of specialist talks on mineral processing. The equipment producer covered 3D system design, optimising grinding processes, after sales service strategies and other industrial sectors that intersect with the cement industry.

US: Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua (GCC) says that the upgrade to its Rapid City cement plant in South Dakota has started operation. The expansion has added 0.44Mt/yr of production capacity to the unit taking its total capacity to 1.18Mt/yr. The project cost US$105m and it started in 2016. Tie-in of the upgrade was finished in late November 2018. Production was suspended during the tie-in-process and has now resumed. The new facilities are now being stabilised.

“The Rapid City expansion comes at an opportune time, as our US cement plants are running nearly at full capacity, and we expect to see continued, steady growth in demand across our market area. We will be able to serve our customers better and operate our cement logistics network more efficiently with the additional capacity,” said Enrique Escalante, GCC’s chief executive officer (CEO).

GCC has 5.8Mt/yr of cement production capacity. Of this, 3.5Mt/yr is in the US, with plants in Pueblo in Colorado, Odessa in Texas, Tijeras in New Mexico, Trident in Montana and Rapid City in South Dakota. GCC expects to ramp up the new production capacity at Rapid City gradually over the next 18 to 24 months, in accordance with market conditions.

GCC’s cement production capacity in Mexico is 2.3Mt/yr from plants in Chihuahua, Juarez and Samalayuca in Chihuahua state. In the third quarter of 2018, GCC reactivated two idled kilns in Chihuahua to increase production of both oil well cement and construction cement.

US: France’s Fives Group has released detail about a project to upgrade the cement mill workshop at Giant Cement’s Harleyville plant in South Carolina. The contracts included the complete engineering, supply, fabrication, transport, installation and commissioning services for material handling, cement grinding and cement loading. New equipment included a clinker and additives transport circuit with a dedusting system, a classifying circuit with a FCB TSV Classifier, a new Fives TGT Filter, all gas and material connections as well as the ball mill internals revamping, a cement truck bulk loading area and a weighing station.

Engineering, offshore supplies and project management were handled by Fives FCB. Onshore supplies and all site works including civil and structural works, mechanical and electrical installations were covered by Fives Solios. Major milestones of the project included starting civil works in November 2017. Mechanical and electrical erection work ran from February to July 2018. First cement production was on 29 June 2018.

Uzbekistan: Uzbek-Chinese joint venture Titan Cement (unrelated to the Greek group of the same name) has commissioned a 0.2Mt/yr plant in the Korauzyak District of the Republic of Karakalpakstan. The project had an investment of nearly US$40m, according to the Uzbekistan Daily newspaper. The funding was comprised of US$19m in direct investment from the joint venture, US$17m from loans and US$2m in foreign investment. This plant was originally reported as having started operation in mid-2016.

Bangladesh: Saudi Arabian company Engineering Dimensions has signed a partnership agreement with Bangladesh Chemical Industries Corporation (BCIC) to build a cement plant at Chhatak in Sunamgan. BCIC Chairman Shah M Aminul Haque and Engineering Dimensions President Mohammed N Hijji signed the deal, according to the Financial Express newspaper. Representatives of the Ministry of Industries and the Saudi Arabian embassy also attended the ceremony.

China: Russia’s Mechel says it has prolonged a coal supply contract with Jidong Cement until the end of 2019. The mining and steel company will supply 2Mt/yr of thermal coal mined at the company’s Elga and Yakutugol mines in South Yakutia. Monthly supplies will vary from 100,000 to 150,000t of coal products. Prices will be adjusted on a monthly basis following negotiations and on the basis of index rates.

“This is a third major contract signed by Mechel and Jidong Cement. I am sure that our ties will continue to develop in a constructive manner in the future. It is also important to note that Jidong Cement is a key customer of Elga’s thermal coal in Asia. In 2017 we supplied our Chinese partners with 1.9Mt and another 1.4Mt in 2018. In 2019 we plan to export thermal coal from Elga in comparable volumes,” said Mechel Mining Management’s chief executive officer (CEO) Pavel Shtark.

India: Prime Minister Narendra Modi says he wants to reduce the rate of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) on regular items, including cement, to 18% from 28%. A proposal to reduce the rate will be considered by the GST Council in late December 2018, according to the Economic Times. Luxury items are likely to remain in the higher tax bracket.

Pakistan: Two contract workers at Lucky Cement’s plant in Pezu, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province have been killed in a gun attacked on a bus. A third worker was wounded in the incident, according to the Dawn newspaper. Local police are searching for the killers.

US: Claudius Peters has been awarded the ‘Innovator of the Year’ award in the Design & Manufacturing category at the Autodesk University (AU) Las Vegas in November 2018. It was given due to changes Claudius Peters made to its engineering and business processes, which led in turn to a ’generative design’ approach to some of its largest manufactured components, including its clinker cooler product. The equipment manufacturer has adopted an agile project management system similar to that used in computer software development. It has removed traditional departmental barriers between engineering and manufacturing teams and replaced them with ‘scrum’ teams of 5 to 9 persons.

“Our project team included young people who embraced this new concept and understood that the electric light didn’t come from the continuous improvement of candles. It needed a complete change. That’s how we came to try generative design. By inputting the project parameters, computers can do the heavy lifting, freeing up our engineers to innovate,” said Thomas Nagel, Chief Digital Officer at Claudius Peters.

Previously we’ve finished the year by recapping the major news stories from an editorial perspective. If you’re interested in that approach we suggest you read the trends articles in the December 2018 issue of Global Cement Magazine. Here on the website though we’ve decided to run it by readership figures. So, instead of suggesting what we think you should be interested in, we’re flagging up what you are actually stimulated by. Fortunately, unlike the search engines, we don’t run the kind of content to make one lose faith in humanity. Nevertheless though there are some interesting observations to make.

Top 5 country tags on Global Cement website in 2018

5. Egypt
4. Vietnam
3. Pakistan
2. Philippines
1. India

Firstly, as the list of country tags shows the emphasis from readers is very much on developing economies with strong cement industries. India is the second biggest cement producing country in the world and the others are all major manufacturers in their regions. The Philippines is riding an infrastructure boom, Pakistan is a major exporter of cement and has its own infrastructure growth from Chinese investment, Vietnam is another major exporter and Egypt is the largest producer in Africa. Incidentally, Egypt opened a 13Mt/yr cement plant at Beni Suef with six production lines in 2018. These are places where the action is at in the cement industry.

Top 10 news stories on Global Cement website in 2018

10. Big Boss Cement to launch in the Philippines
9. Dalmia Bharat set to buy Kalyanpur Cement
8. Wonder Cement plant launched in Maharashtra
7. LafargeHolcim to sell US$1.7bn of assets after poor first half
6. Birla Corporation confirms plans to build new cement plant at Mukutban
5. ACC in talks to buy remaining cement business from Jaiprakash Associates
4. LafargeHolcim to close Paris headquarters
3. Global Cement & Concrete Association launches
2. ThyssenKrupp to build new cement plant for LafargeHolcim in Morocco
1. Brisk cement trade reported at Ethiopian-Eritrean border

As for the news stories there are several general trends to note. Firstly, the machinations of the Indian producers fill up four of the top ten positions. We’ve noted the size of the industry but it is also worth remembering the common use of English in that country. Secondly, the world’s largest multinational cement producer, LafargeHolcim receives three mentions. Again, no surprise here. We have shades of the company realigning itself after poor financial results and pointing at developing countries. The closure of the former Lafarge headquarters in Paris ties into the former and strikes a nostalgic note following the merger between Lafarge and Holcim in 2015.

From here there’s one story that we included in our roundup for 2018, the formation of the Global Cement & Concrete Association (GCCA). Readers of the BBC News website would have spotted the GCCA’s head Benjamin Sporton popping up in a feature on cement industry carbon emissions. He’s not long been in the job but this is exactly the kind of advocacy the association should be doing on behalf of the industry.

As for the top news story for 2018, it’s not what we’d have chosen in a round-up, but it sums up the importance of cement to people’s lives. It’s a commodity and where people build things they need it. Normalise relations between bordering countries and cement will flow if it can. Now that’s a goodwill story to end the year.

Enjoy the Christmas and New Year break if you have one.

Global Cement Weekly will return on 2 January 2019