October 2025

Ireland: Ecocem Ireland has appointed Micheál McKittrick as its Managing Director for Ireland and the UK. His role involves the management of all aspects of the Irish and UK operations. McKittrick is a Chartered Engineer and graduate of Trinity College Dublin. He previously worked in several senior roles with Atkins Consulting Engineers.

Mexico: Mauricio Doehmer has been appointed as the president of the National Chamber of Cement. He is Cemex’s corporate affairs and business risk management executive vice-president, according to the El Financiero newspaper. He succeeds Billy Alvarez, an executive with Cementos Cruz Azul.

Switzerland: The board of directors of LafargeHolcim will nominate Patrick Kron for election as a new board member at the group’s upcoming Annual General Meeting on 3 May 2017. At the same time Philippe Dauman and Alexander Gut have taken the decision not to stand for re-election. Bruno Lafont, currently co-chairman of the board of directors, has also stated previously that he will not stand for re-election. Following the election of the nominees, the board of directors will reduce in size to 12 members from 14 at present.

Kron, a French national who was born in 1953, is a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique and the Paris Ecole des Mines, France. He began his career at the French Industry Ministry in 1979 before joining the Pechiney group in 1984. In 1993, he became member of the executive committee of the Pechiney group and was chairman and chief executive officer of Carbone Lorraine from 1993 to 1997. From 1995 to 1997, he ran Pechiney’s Food and Health Care Packaging Sector and held the position of chief operating officer of the American National Can Company in Chicago, US. From 1998 to 2002, Kron was chairman of the executive board of Imerys. He has been a director of Alstom since July 2001 and he was appointed chief executive officer of Alstom in January 2003, and then chairman and chief executive officer in March 2003, a position he held until January 2016 when he set up Patrick Kron - Conseils & Investissements.

Unsurprisingly the European Commission blocked Duna-Dráva Cement’s (DDC) attempted purchase of Cemex Croatia this week. Merging the country’s biggest cement producer with its largest importer was going to be a challenge for the commission. Whereas in previous transactions the various parties offered business disposals to ease the commission’s concerns, here all they were got was access to a cement terminal in Metković in southern Croatia. And this facility on the Neretva river is currently being leased by Cemex! Clearly this didn’t give the impression of being a long term solution.

Compare this with the merger between Lafarge and Holcim in 2015 where multiple sales were proposed to make sure the deal went through. Or look at the acquisition of Italcementi by HeidelbergCement in 2016 where the parties sold Italcementi’s Belgian subsidiary Compagnie des Ciments Belges to Cementir to make the deal happen. In comparison to these deals the attempt by HeidelbergCement and Schwenk, through their subsidiary DDC, comes across as a calculated gamble designed to test the resolve of the commission. If the commission had somehow passed the proposed acquisition then the companies would have cornered the market. If it turned it down, as it has, then nothing would be lost other than putting together the bid. HeidelbergCement had its mind on bigger things as it bought and then integrated Italcementi.

Commissioner Margrethe Vestager summed up the mood of the commission: “For mergers between direct competitors, we generally have a preference for a clean, structural solution, such as selling a production plant. HeidelbergCement and Schwenk decided not to offer that. Instead they proposed to give a competitor access to a cement terminal in southern Croatia. Essentially, this amounted to giving a competitor access to a storage facility – without existing customers or established access to cement, without brands and without sales or managerial staff.”

Elsewhere, the other big story in the industry news this week was Votorantim’s decision to focus on the lime business in Brazil by adding lime units to some of its existing cement plants. Given the dire state of the local cement and construction industry, initiatives to break the deadlock have been expected. The alternative is plant closures and divestures, such as the ongoing talks by Camargo Corrêa to sell the other big local producer, InterCement. Votorantim plans to build lime units attached to the cement plants at Nobres in Mato Grosso, Xambioa in Tocantins, Primavera in Pará and Idealiza in Goiás. Unfortunately the agricultural areas of the country and ones with cement plants don’t overlay neatly. Cement production is mainly focused in the south-eastern states and Votorantim are targeting the Cerrado, in the centre of the country, for the lime business.

The scale of the project, at US$50m, the scale of the lime business generally and the addition of lime units at cement plants suggest that the pivot to lime can only be a sideline to cement and construction. Given the similarity of the cement and lime production processes the announcement would be much more significant were Votorantim set to convert clinker kilns into lime ones. A notable example of this was at Cement Australia’s Gladstone plant in Queensland, Australia. Here a mothballed FCB-Ciment clinker kiln was converted into a lime kiln in the early 2000s. At the time the cost of the conversion project was valued at just under US$20m. If Votorantim was seriously thinking of doing this at a few of their underperforming cement plants then one would expect the bill to be higher than US$50m. However, it’s early days yet.

Nigeria: Adepeju Adebajo has resigned as an executive director of Lafarge Africa. Adebajo was the Managing Director, Wapco Operations and then Managing Director, Geo-Cycle and Project Management Office at Lafarge Africa. Her resignation from Lafarge follows her appointment as the Honourable Commissioner for Agriculture in Ogun State.

Check out this great graph that the UK Mineral Products Association (MPA) released in its latest sustainable development report this week. It lays out where the MPA says the various direct and indirect costs come from climate change policies per tonne of cement.

Graph 1: The cumulative burden of direct and indirect cost of climate change policies on the cement sector (per tonne of cement). GBP£1 = Euro0.94 at time of writing. Source: MPA. 

If it’s correct then the two biggest contributors from carbon taxes on the price of cement in the UK arise from the Carbon Price Support (CPS) mechanism and the Renewable Obligation (RO). Between them the two policies account for around two-thirds of the carbon tax burden on the price of cement. Of note to an industry advocacy body like the MPA, both of these derive from local legislation and they could be changed or dispensed with separate to the Brexit negotiations to extricate the UK from the European Union that have just officially started.

The MPA then goes on to warn that these added costs could rise from GBP£3.24/t at present to GBP£4/t in 2020 and then the truly terrifying (to energy intensive manufacturers at least) GBP£17/t. Subsequently the MPA has flagged these potentially mounting costs as the biggest threat to the UK cement industry in the near future. Failure to act could mean more foreign imports, loss of jobs and damage to the security of supply. All very heavy stuff. The MPA’s warning was nicely timed to precede the UK government’s response to a consultation on another decarbonisation scheme, the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme. Here, the government is about to exempt high-energy users, including cement producers.

Essentially, the key message from the MPA’s report is that the cement sector is picking up but it is still below sales levels in 2007. At the same time it has made all these environmental improvements and, now, steadily tightening regulations threaten its future. Just compare this with the situation in the US where the Portland Cement Association (PCA) recently applauded President Donald Trump’s executive order to roll back environmental legislation from the Obama administration. Despite this it insisted that its members were committed to manufacturing products with a ‘minimal’ environmental footprint.

Funnily enough the MPA didn’t mention environmental issues when it released its updated Brexit priorities for the UK government. This is understandable given the graph above that suggests that the majority of the carbon costs on cement production come from UK legislation. However, sharing a land border with the EU south of Northern Ireland may give rise to all sorts of market skulduggery once any sort of post-Brexit deal becomes clear. And this doesn’t even take into account moving secondary cementitious materials about, like slag, or the UK’s international market in solid recovered fuels (SRF) and the like. Differences in UK and EU overall carbon costs on cement may start to have acute implications for producers in both jurisdictions as the negotiations build. In this atmosphere moves like Ireland’s Quinn Cement’s last month, to build a terminal on the UK side of the Irish border, make a lot of sense.

UK: Laurence Millington has been appointed the managing director of Vortex’s operations based from Darlington in the UK. He succeeds Travis Young, who managed the company’s international operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asian markets since 2008. Young will become the Executive Vice President of Marketing and Global Strategy at Vortex’s corporate headquarters in Kansas, US.

Millington has been employed with the company since 2009 and was promoted to the role of Sales Director, EMEA and Asia, in 2015. Young has been with the company since 2004. Founded in 1977, Vortex designs and manufactures valves and dustless loading equipment for handling dry bulk material in the mineral, chemical and food industries.

Australia: Adelaide Brighton has appointed Zlatko Todorcevski as a non-executive director. He has a Bachelor of Commerce (Accounting) and holds an MBA. He has worked for more than 30 years in the oil and gas, logistics and manufacturing sectors in Australia and overseas and has a background in finance, strategy and planning. He has previously held the position of Chief Financial Officer with BHP Billiton’s Energy business, Oil Search Limited and most recently at Brambles.

Lots of fascinating information has been emerging in recent weeks about changes in the Chinese cement industry as the larger producers have published their annual financial results. One example is the focus on using alternative fuels to fire up kilns. As explained below, the spotlight on co-processing is state-mandated and this is why the producers are now keen to promote their adherence. Even so, as ever with China, the scale of the change is staggering.

For example, Anhui Conch reported that it had completed 15 waste treatment projects and one sludge treatment project in 2016. In addition it had three projects still undergoing construction at the year-end. The group said that it co-processed 600,000t of domestic waste in its cement kilns in 2016. All of this was achieved by a company that says it only started co-processing municipal waste from its first project in 2010. China Resources Cement’s (CRC) progress was slower but it managed to start a co-processing project at its plant in Binyang County, Guangxi in December 2015 and a sludge project in Nanning City, Guangxi in July 2016. New projects at Tianyang County, Guangxi and Midu County, Yunnan are being built at present, with completion expected by the end of 2017.

Long held rumours about production overcapacity in China came to head in 2015 with the National Bureau of Statistics in China (NBSC) reporting that sales dropped in 2015 following a decade of steady growth. Then the results of most of major producers followed this by falling in 2015. CRC presented a good history of what happened next in the Chinese cement industry in its results report [LINK]. In brief, in 2016 the Chinese government implemented supply-side structural reforms focusing on production efficiency, reiterating attempts to stop new production capacity being built and pushing environmental reforms. Throughout the year various government offices released guidelines to encourage market consolidation, cut obsolete production capacity, increase co-processing rates and decrease the energy needed to produce each tonne of clinker.

Graph 1: Cement sales in China, 2012 – 2016. Source: National Bureau of Statistics in China.

Whether or not any of this has helped the Chinese cement industry to overcome the problems it faced in 2015 is unclear. As Graph 1 shows, Chinese cement sales started to rise again slightly to 2.35Bnt in 2016 from 2.31Bnt in 2015. Sales revenue from some of the major cement producers presents a more varied picture as can be seen in Graph 2. Anhui Conch’s revenue rose by 9.7% year-on-year to US$8.12bn in 2016, China National Building Material Company’s (CNBM) revenue rose by 1% to US$14.8bn and CRC’s revenue fell by 4.2% to US$3.3bn. CRC may have suffered here from its relative business concentration in southeast China. Both Anhui Conch’s and CNBM’s results seemed to look patchy in mid-2016 when they released their half-year reports, but both sales and profits seemed to pick up sharply in the second half of the year.

Graph 2: Sales revenue from selected major Chinese cement producers. Source: Company annual reports.

As the current set of structural reforms kick in within the Chinese cement industry it will be interesting to see what happens next. From plans to cut 10% of local clinker production capacity by 2020 to ambitious environmental aims the sector barely has time to catch its breath. The question is whether the major producers balance sheets are being helped more by a recovering local market or by the reforms. Either way the uptake of alternative fuels is encouraging.

Kenya: Bamburi Cement has appointed three women to its board of directors. Alice Owuor, Rita Kavashe and Hellen Gichohi have been appointed to the board, according to the Business Daily newspaper. Two female directors Sheila M’Mbijjewe and Catherine Langreney, resigned from the board in 2016 leaving it with an all-male composition and no female representation.

Owuor was the former Kenya Revenue Authority Commissioner for Domestic Taxes until she retired in 2016. Kavashe has been the chief executive of General Motors East Africa since 2011 and has worked for the motor vehicle dealer for more than two decades.

Gichohi is the managing director of the Equity Bank’s social arm, the Equity Group Foundation. She joined the Equity Group Foundation in 2012 from the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) where she served for 11 years from 2001, as the President from 2007, Vice President from 2002 and Director of the Conservation Program from 2001 when she joined AWF. She holds a PhD in Ecology from the University of Leicester in the UK, a Master of Science degree in Biology of Conservation, and a BSc in Zoology from the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University respectively.