Displaying items by tag: China

Peru’s been the place over the last week with news reports of new production capacity and its targeting as a key export market by Vietnam.

Local press reported this week that three new cement grinding plants are planned to start production in 2019. Cemento Inka plans to build a 0.6Mt/yr grinding plant at Ica near Pisco. It also plans to upgrade the kilns at its plant at Cajamarquilla near Lima. Then Mixercon, a ready-mix concrete firm, wants to spend US$20m towards building two new plants in northern Lima, also in 2019. It also has plans to open distribution centres around the capital too.

For a local industry generally dominated by local often family-controlled producers this is quite a change. The larger companies – Pacasmayo, UNACEM and Yura – normally dominate the headlines and the market here. Unsurprisingly then that Pacasmayo and Yura also have upgrades planned for their plants in 2019 too.

Changes to capacity started in late May 2018 when Salaverry-based importer Invecem was said to be buying equipment for a 0.25Mt/yr grinding plant. Then things really started moving when Unacem bought Cementos Portland (Cempor), a joint venture between Chile's Cementos Bío Bío and Brazil’s Votorantim Cimentos. The foreign companies were planning to build a plant near Lima but the project was delayed by a legal battle over environmental issues intitiated by Unacem. This was followed by Cal & Cemento Sur (Calcesur), a subsidiary of Grupo Gloria, announcing that it was going to add a new production line to its cement and lime plant in Puno.

With this level of interest in grinding plants going on it’s unsurprising that Vietnam, a major exporter of cement, has taken an interest. Imports of cement to Peru rose by 65% year-on-year to 0.94Mt in the 12 months from December 2017 to November 2018 from 0.57Mt in the same period previously. Imports of clinker rose by 37% to 0.78Mt from 0.57Mt. This compares to a rise of 21% to 0.61Mt in cement imports in 2017 and a fall of 1.2% to 0.51Mt in 2016. In the 12 months to the end of November 2018 most of that imported cement (81%) came from Vietnam followed by 14% from China and 3% from Mexico. Clinker imports have been more varied with 39% from South Korea, 31% from Vietnam, 19% from Ecuador and 11% from Japan. The general situation for the clinker producers has been a slight increase in cement production to 10Mt for the 12 months to the end of November 2018 and slightly higher increases in despatches.

So, it looks like an apparent cement demand is up in Peru and the importers are rushing to meeting demand. The question, then, is why haven’t the clinker producers announced projects to squeeze out the grinders? As mentioned above Pacasmayo and Yura have upgrades planned but nothing really large seems to be coming yet. Also, given the tough time Cempor was given by the local companies what kind of opposition are the new projects by Cemento Inka, Mixercon and Invecem likely to face? The country’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate is below the glory days of the 2000s when it topped 6% but it is still one of the strongest in South America with 3.8% forecast for 2019 by the World Bank. This is the country in the region to watch in 2019.

Argentina: China’s Sinoma International says that it has successfully lifted the first steel column of the pre-heater tower on a 5800t/day production line it is building at Loma Negra’s L'Amalí cement plant. The work in late December 2018 marked the start of the installation phase of the project. It is the subsidiary of China National Building Material’s (CNBM) first engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) project in South America. When the project was first announced in late 2017 it had a completion date of early 2020.

Algeria: Germany’s Aumund has received two clinker conveying equipment orders for cement plants at Zahana and Bechar. The two orders comprise 26 belt and chain bucket elevators, two bucket apron conveyors, ten pan conveyors and ten drag chain conveyors. No value for the deals has been disclosed.

The first order is for the 4500t/day Société des Ciments de Zahana (SCIZ) plant near Oran. Here three chain bucket elevators with centre distances ranging from 22.5 - 34.9m and capacities from 50 - 220t/hr will be used to convey cement and clinker. 11 belt bucket elevators (22.5 -116.1m) will convey raw meal, cement and clinker with capacities between 190 - 680t/hr. The Aumund bucket apron conveyor, with a centre distance of 61.1m and a capacity of 360t/hr, will join the five Aumund pan conveyors (18.3 - 106.8m, capacity 300 - 360t/hr) in conveying clinker. The ten Aumund drag chain conveyors with centre distances between 6.1 - 33.8m will be used in clinker dust extraction and are designed for conveying capacities from 15 - 80t/hr.

The second order is for the 3200t/day Bechar cement plant. This order was placed by China’s CBMI to Aumund Beijing with support from Aumund France. This plant will operate 15 Aumund belt and chain bucket elevators, five Aumund pan conveyors and an Aumund bucket apron conveyor for its bulk materials handling. The bucket elevators, with centre distances ranging from 11 - 102.9m, will convey raw meal, cement and clinker with capacities from 70 – 480t/hr. The five pan conveyors, with centre distances from 22.2 - 89.8m, will convey their loads at up to 480t/hr. The Aumund bucket apron conveyor in Bechar (centre distance 88.5m, capacity 200t/hr) will also convey clinker.

China: West China Cement says that it is expecting its net profit to record a ‘substantial’ increase year-on-year in 2018. It has attributed this to a rise in average cement prices. Subsequently, its sales revenue rose by 28% year-on-year for the first eleven months of 2018 compared to the same period in 2017.

Nigeria: BUA Group has ordered a 3Mt/yr production line from China’s CBMI for its Kalambaina cement plant in Sokoto State. It follows the commissioning of a 1.5Mt/yr line at the site in mid-2018, according to the This Day newspaper. The company also completed a new line at its Obu plant at Okpella in Edo State in late 2018. BUA Group will have a production capacity of 11Mt/yr once the new project is completed. BUA Group is also in the process of merging with the Cement Company of Northern Nigeria (CCNN).

Central America: The value of Chinese imports of cement grew by 2% year-on-year to US$77.1m in the first half of 2018 from US$75.6m in the same period in 2017. Nicaragua imported around US$28m, Guatemala US$18m, El Salvador US$12m, Honduras US$7m, Panama US$6m and Costa Rica imported around US$5m, according to CentralAmericaData.

Iraq: China’s Sinoma International Engineering has signed a contract to build a 6000t/day clinker production line for Iraqi Cement near Samawah in the Al Muthanna Governorate. The deal has a value of US$246m. The contract includes the entire production process from quarry to finished packaging of cement products. Once the contract is finalised and the customer’s credit secured then the project is expected to take 37 months to be completed.

China: Anhui Conch has continued a cement sale and purchase agreement with Jiangsu Conch Building Materials by entering into a new contract worth US$364m. Subsidiaries of Anhui Conch based in east China will sell a total of 7.5Mt of cement products to Jiangsu Conch, a non-wholly owned subsidiary of Anhui Conch, in 2019. Additionally, three of Anhui Conch’s subsidiaries in Shanghai region will procure 0.13Mt of fly ash and 70,000t of flue gas desulphurisation gypsum from Jiangsu Conch Building Materials in 2019 for a value of around US$3m. The deals follow a similar arrangement for Anhui Conch to sell cement to Jiangsu Conch in 2018.

Vietnam: Xie Guozhen, the head of the Vietnam office of Nanjing C-HOPE Cement Engineering Group, says that the company is planning to build a new production line at the Lien Khe plant in Haiphong. The Chinese engineering firm has previously built five cement production lines in the country, according to the Viet Nam News newspaper.

Vietnam: Data from the Vietnam Cement Association (VNCA) shows that the country’s export volumes of cement rose by 55% year-on-year to 31.7Mt in 2018. Producers generated an estimated US$1.2bn from exports, according to the Viet Nam News newspaper. The VNCA’s Chairman Nguyen Quang Cung attributed growing exports to decreased production in China, where production lines have been closed due to pollution.

The Ministry of Construction has attributed growing exports to better performance in the construction sector. Domestic cement consumption grew by 9% to 65.1Mt in 2018. It estimates that consumption will rise by up to 8% in 2019 to around 99Mt, comprising 69Mt for the local market and 30Mt for export. The main export markets in 2019 are expected to be the Philippines, Bangladesh, China, Taiwan and Peru.