August 2025

US: Queens Carbon has secured US$10m in seed funding to scale up production of its novel cement and supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs). The start-up will build a 2000t/yr demonstration plant at strategic partner Buzzi Unicem USA's Stockertown, Pennsylvania, cement plant. The plant will demonstrate Queens Carbon’s low-energy Q-Reactor technology, which employs novel hydrothermal chemistry, with the help of steam and pressure, to combine standard cement feedstocks into carbon-neutral hydraulic cement and SCMs. The company’s flagship product, Q-SCM, is capable of replacing up to 50% of cement in concrete mixes. Queens Carbon says that it will now also begin preparations for its first full-scale commercial plant.

Buzzi Unicem USA was among investors in the seed funding round, led by Climate technologies investor Clean Energy Ventures, with participation from fellow venture capital firm Plug and Play.

Queens Carbon CEO Daniel Kopp said "With support from Clean Energy Ventures, Buzzi Unicem USA and the US Department of Energy, we're building next-generation technology and assembling the creative talent needed to drive industry revenues to move cement innovation forward and significantly reduce CO₂ emissions from cement production, all without a green premium."

Luigi Buzzi, Chief Technology Officer at Italy-based Buzzi, said "We know that achieving our goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 demands forward-thinking solutions to enhance both our operations and our environmental performance.”

Pakistan: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has introduced a new valuation mechanism for collecting sales tax on cement, effective 1 May 2025. Under the revised approach, the FBR will use the average national retail price of cement as reported in the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics' (PBS) weekly Sensitive Price Index (SPI). Average prices will be calculated just before the 1st and 16th of each month, with the values used to calculate taxes for the approximately two-week periods that begin on the corresponding dates.

FBR officials said the decision aims to prevent under-invoicing practices within the cement sector by aligning the taxable value with officially reported retail prices.
By using PBS data as the benchmark, the FBR expects to streamline sales tax collection and reduce revenue leakage in the cement supply chain.

North Macedonia: Cementarnica Usje, part of Greece’s Titan Cement, said that its net profit plunged by 47% year-on-year to €2.6m in the first three months of 2025. This was despite just a 2% decrease in total operating revenues, which came in at US$19.5m over the three-month period. Total operating expenses grew by 22% year-on-year to US$15.2m, mostly due to higher costs for raw materials.

Morocco: Cement sales increased by 4.5% during the first quarter of 2025, to reach 3.38Mt, according to the Department of Financial Studies and Forecasts. Sales in the same period of 2024 were 3.25Mt. This growth was reportedly driven in particular by the precast concrete sector, which saw growth of 16.8%, and the ready-mix concrete sector, which grew by 18.6% year-on-year.

Angola: The government has announced that it expects to receive around US$240m from the privatisation of three companies owned by China International Found (CIF) Angola, following the auction of their factories. As well as CIF Automobile Assembly Unit and CIF Lowenda Beer Factory, the government is privatising CIF Cement Cement Factory, for which it anticipates receiving US$197m for the asset. The Griner/Ciment/Mercons consortium was the preferred bidder, with the H&S/Yupeng consortium second, Moçambique Dugongo Cimentos third and Huaxin Cement fourth.

The three companies were previously nationalised by the Angolan state as part of an anti-corruption process.

Greece: Titan Group has once again been named one of Europe's Climate Leaders in the fifth edition of a prestigious list published by the Financial Times. This marks Titan's second consecutive year of recognition, reaffirming the company's commitment to environmental stewardship and sustainable business practices. It also highlights Titan's accelerated progress toward achieving net zero, in line with its Green Growth Strategy 2026. Titan achieved the highest score in its sector.

The selection criteria focuses on companies that have delivered the largest reductions in Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions intensity between 2018 and 2023. Titan reported that its efforts to mitigate climate change were instrumental to its inclusion, with a total CO2 reduction of 9.6% achieved during this period. In addition, Titan's transparency regarding Scope 3 emissions and its active engagement with sustainability assessors, including CDP and the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), contributed to its recognition.

North Korea: The Kangso Cement Factory has reportedly increased the rate of extraction from its quarry following an earlier kiln capacity upgrade, according to the Korean Central News Agency, which speaks for the Workers’ Party of Korea and the country’s national government.

It says that officials and workers have fulfilled production plans by ‘ensuring proper cooperation between shifts and between production lines’ and operating equipment at full capacity. It said that the workers and technicians of the calcining work-team are improving the quality of products and that workers responsible for cement production are producing more cement than planned every day by ‘checking, repairing and maintaining equipment with foresight.’

Anhui Conch Cement held an event in Wuhu, China, this week showcasing its new artificial intelligence (AI) model for the cement sector. The cement company and Huawei started the project in April 2024 with the support of the China Building Materials Federation. The companies say they have now identified over 200 “promising AI application scenarios across 15 categories” across the entire production process from quarrying to packaging and logistics. Conch has set up an AI training centre using the Huawei Cloud Stack product. It is using Huawei’s Pangu prediction, computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) models to create an AI operating system that integrates central training, edge inference, cloud-edge synergy, continuous learning and ongoing optimisation.

Thankfully Huawei gave some examples of what this actually meant for operators in the real world. The model is able to give real-time recommendations of key quality features enabling the prediction of three-day and 28-day clinker strength. The predicted strength values closely match test results, with deviations within 1MPa and an accuracy rate exceeding 85%. Other benefits include reducing kiln fuel consumption by 1%, monitoring and managing various components and machines along the production line, staff safety gains and creating a ‘smart digital assistant’ that can answer technical questions from employees.

Little of this seems particularly novel, so far, compared to what other companies are already doing in this field. For example, ABB said in early 2022 that it was using machine learning to predict 28-day strength on the day of sampling and in 2023 that it was doing it using production data provided every two - three hours. Another example is the work that Inform does using AI-based software to support logistics for heavy building materials. Plenty of other western-based companies also offer production optimisation and/or predictive maintenance products.

Conch’s use of an NLP model to create a knowledge base assistant does seem new for the cement sector. Although how specific the software running it might be to one business or industrial area remains to be seen. One could easily imagine this kind of product being sold to lots of different kinds of industries in the manner of current enterprise style software. Along these lines though, Juan Beltrán, digital manager of global sales excellence at Holcim, told McKinsey in an interview about Holcim’s pilot project in Spain testing an AI-enabled copilot customer-ordering assistant via WhatsApp.

Recent events in AI for the cement sector include ABB’s agreement to work with UK-based Carbon Re in late 2024. This collaboration was intended to combine ABB's expertise in automation and process control with Carbon Re's AI and machine learning technologies. It followed a pilot at a cement plant in the Czech Republic. On the producer side, Holcim said in mid-2024 that it was preparing to expand the use of AI-based software to 100 production plants by 2028. It noted that it had installed the system at 45 plants so far at the time of this announcement and that it was using a predictive maintenance solution from software supplier C3 AI. Titan Cement said that it had invested in Spain-based AI software supplier Optimitive in February 2025. Then, Cemex announced this week that it too had invested in Optimitive, via its corporate venture capital arm Cemex Ventures. Molins has also worked with Optimitive.

What isn't being disclosed much are the examples of the mistakes of introducing AI into cement production. These are valuable learning opportunities for any company implementing this kind of software. However, the developers and cement producers are extremely unlikely to admit anything publicly. Global Cement Weekly has heard off-the-record information previously about AI projects at cement plants that have gone wrong but we can’t reveal it either. To his credit though Beltrán mentions an incident, in his interview with McKinsey, where the WhatsApp ordering assistant was tricked during testing into almost placing an order for a truck of gazpacho soup!

We’re still watching how AI is being deployed in heavy industries such as cement. The announcement by Conch is exactly the kind of thing its peers are doing around the world. So far what they’ve done is impressive but not unique. Yet, China’s large but shrinking cement sector and its determination to develop its own AI-based software sector may start to deliver more cutting-edge advances in the future. Companies elsewhere are also pressing ahead to find out how AI products will deliver efficiency gains.

Canada: Lafarge Canada has appointed Edgardo Rivas as the plant manager of its Brookfield cement plant in Nova Scotia.

Rivas previously worked as a Maintenance Manager for Lafarge Canada from 2023. Before this he held maintenance and engineering roles for Cementos Argos in Honduras from 2015 to 2023. Notably, he was the plant manager of the Río Blanquito grinding unit from 2017 to 2023. Before this, he held positions with Industria Venezolana de Cemento in Venezuela from 2009 to 2015. Rivas holds an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the Universidad Simón Bolívar.

Dominican Republic: Sinoma CBMI Latin America has celebrated the completion of the PANAM cement project in the Dominican Republic. The project involved construction of a ‘modern’ cement grinding plant for Cemento PANAM, part of Grupo Estrella. According to a post on social media by Sinoma, the plant has a production capacity of 1.23Mt/yr, and integrates ‘advanced, carbon-neutral technologies’ to reduce environmental impact. The plant features a Gebr. Pfeiffer vertical roller mill with a capacity of 155t/hr of cement.