Displaying items by tag: CalPortland

Congratulations are in order for CalPortland. It celebrates its 125th anniversary or quasquicentennial today. According to the company blurb on the website, a cement plant was established in 1891 in Colton, California. This was the first plant west of the Rockies and it went on to supply building materials towards the development of Los Angeles. However, the website doesn’t exactly shout about its purchase in 1990 by one of the Japanese companies that eventually became Taiheiyo Cement. Its earliest constituent company, the Cement Manufacturing Company, was established 10 years earlier than CalPortland in 1881. So perhaps CalPortland could celebrate the 135th anniversary of its Japanese owners at some point this year too.

Table 1: Age of leading cement companies by production capacity: Source: The Top 100 Report 2016, Global Cement Directory 2016, company websites, Wikipedia

As can be seen from Table 1, a list of major cement producers by production capacity in 2016, most of the European or non-Chinese multinationals are old. They have roots in various predecessor companies going back at least a century. By contrast most of the Chinese producers on this list are far younger having been established since the 1980s.

Table 2: Age of selected older cement companies still in business: Source: Company websites.

Table 2 adds an international perspective from the cement industry to CalPortland’s achievement. It’s an arbitrary list chosen from larger, mostly multinational cement producers that still operate today. As such it may well be missing some key names. However, they all follow the first industrial revolution innovators in cement such as John Smeaton, Joseph Aspdin or Louis Vicat. A generation later the first cement companies that have endured to the present in some form or another such as Lafarge, Vicat or Dyckerhoff started to appear. As impressive as the longevity of these companies are though, they pale in comparison to Saint-Gobain, the French construction materials company that was first established in 1665.

A BBC News article on company lifespans found that the average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P 500 index of leading US companies had decreased from 67 years in the 1920s to 15 years in 2012, according to research by Professor Richard Foster of Yale University [LINK]. By this measure most of the cement companies examined here are doing well. Yet, most of the older ones have endured such a tangle of mergers, acquisitions and changes that it is debatable whether any of them could be considered the same company as their originator. Joseph-Auguste Pavin de Lafarge may have started his operations at Teil in the Ardèche region of France in 1833 but LafargeHolcim, its modern day successor, is only one year old following its creation from Lafarge and Holcim in 2015.

This leads to the Ship of Theseus' paradox or the thought experiment regarding whether an object that has all of its parts replaced is still the same object. Just as humans gradually have most of their constituent parts (or cells) replaced over time so too do long-lasting companies. One superficial response is to point out that memory or heritage can have a lasting effect for individual, national and corporate entities. Just compare, for example, the different outlook of western European national states with millennia of continuation to much newer nations in the Americas. European countries, like the UK, are often seen as being old and stuffy compared to new world dynamism despite all the citizens in both regions being younger than their countries.

To end on a cementitious note, perhaps this dilemma should be renamed the Kiln of Theseus paradox for the cement industry. If a cement plant’s engineers replace all the parts of a cement kiln is it still the same kiln? The suspicion is that the staff at CalPortland would definitely think it is!

If any readers have a suggested name for a 135th anniversary This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

US: CalPortland will celebrate its 125-year anniversary, or quasquicentennial, on 21 September 2016. The company was established in 1891 in Colton, California as the California Portland Cement company, the first cement production facility west of the Rocky Mountains. Subsequently, the cement producer provided construction materials for the expansion of Los Angeles and the south-western US. Japan’s Taiheiyo Cement purchased the company in 1990.

"Today, CalPortland is building on its past for a bright and better future. Through key strategic mergers and acquisitions we have brought together more technology and the best people and now proudly serve six western states and two Canadian provinces. CalPortland is dedicated to using all of our resources to help make our customers successful," said Allen Hamblen, President and CEO of CalPortland.

Back in the May 2016 issue of Global Cement Magazine we asked key people at the Portland Cement Association how they thought the US presidential election might affect the local cement industry. Wisely, for an advocacy organisation with offices in Washington DC, no one would be drawn, citing a lack of information. At that point it was still unclear who was going to be on the final ticket. However, we all missed a trick because one candidate, Donald Trump, had been talking about building ‘a border fence like you have never seen before’ since at least mid-2014. And that fence could potentially require a lot of cement.

Researchers at market analysts Bernstein’s sent a note to clients last week ahead of the Republican National Convention looking at the implications of if Donald Trump became president of the US and actually set out to build his 40ft high concrete wall between the US and Mexico. The result would be a 2.4Mt boost in demand for cement from cement producers near to the border. In terms of market demand Bernstein concluded that this would add over 1% to cement demand in both 2018 and 2019, a healthy ‘shot in the arm’ to the already pepped-up US cement industry, which is currently growing at around 5%/yr.

Map 1: Map of cement and ready-mix concrete plants near to the US - Mexico border. Source: Bernstein Materials Blast. Note – Bernstein does not show the Capitol Cement plant in San Antonio.

Needless to say, Bernstein’s calculations pile-drive assumptions into assumptions, atop of Trump’s political rhetoric. It bases its calculations on a border wall similar to the Israeli West Bank barrier built out of precast concrete panels. It also tries to model how much concrete and cement would be required depending on the differing height’s Trump has trumpeted at his rallies.

The kicker to this tongue-in-cheek analysis is that the construction company that stands to benefit the most from this infrastructure project is Mexican!

Cemex has significantly more cement plants and ready-mix concrete plants than any other company within a 200-mile zone either side of the border. Looking at integrated cement plants alone, it has six plants in the regions near to the proposed wall from the east and west coasts. Its nearest competitors, CalPortland with four plants and Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua with three plants, are more regionally based in the western US and Chihuahua state in Mexico. Clearly Cemex didn’t rate the chances of Donald Trump’s wall actually happening when it agreed to sell its Odessa cement plant to Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua in May 2016.

All of this goes to show that, wherever you stand on the Donald Trump presidency bid, if you manufacture cement near the US-Mexican border you might be working overtime if he (a) actually becomes president, (b) actually manages to start building his wall and (c) actually decides to make it using cement. Yet before anybody starts popping champagne corks consider this: there might also be unintended consequences for the cement sector. Restricting current legal and illegal migration trends from Mexico to the US might have a greater negative effect on the US cement industry, and the overall economy, than ordering one large infrastructure project. Working that one out is harder than a guesstimate of how much cement a border wall might consume. Probably best not to ask at this stage who might actually pay for the Great Wall of Donald Trump.

US/Japan: Taiheiyo Cement Corp has announced that its California subsidiary CalPortland Co will buy North Carolina-based Martin Marietta Materials Inc's cement business in California for US$420m. Taiheiyo Cement aims to complete the acquisition procedures by the end of September 2015. The acquisition will allow the company to recoup the cement production capacity lost by the discontinuation of output at CalPortland's plant in Colton, California and to establish a cement supply system to meet growing demand in California, Arizona and Nevada.