Displaying items by tag: Export

Netherlands: Royal Cement Benelux, part of Royal El Minya Cement and the Sesco Group, has acquired a new 18,500m² facility in the port of Schiedam near Rotterdam. The new facility, which includes 13,500m2 combined office, storage and operating space will be the company’s second European location. Available on the premises is 160 M1 Quay, which can receive ships up to 15,000dwt.

“The opening of Royal Cement Benelux’s new Schiedam facility is an important step towards the ambition to develop the European market,” said Martin Bakker, general manager of Royal Cement Benelux. The company intends to target its white cement products from the terminal to Germany by barge, to several locations in Belgium and the Netherlands by inland rivers and to the UK by sea.

The new location is intended to be first of several expansions for the company in 2020. Royal Cement Benelux says it wants to take former business in Western Europe from CBR since it stopped white cement production. The group is also opening an Italian terminal.

Congo: Nigeria-based Dangote Cement has announced that it will begin shipping cement produced at its 1.5Mt/yr integrated Mfila plant in Bouenza region, Congo, to other African countries.

Reuters News has reported that Dangote Cement’s Nigerian exports fell by 41% to 0.5Mt in 2019 from 0.8Mt in 2018. Dangote Cement CEO Joseph Makoju attributed the flop to the government’s closure of Nigeria’s border with Benin, part of a crackdown on smuggling and the illegal weapons trade.

Algeria: Public Industrial Cement Group of Algeria (GICA) subsidiary Beni Saf has announced a target of 45,000t in 2020 of clinker exported to Africa. Algérie Presse Service has reported that the recipient countries include those in the sub-Saharan region.

Poland: Belarusian Cement Company (BCC) says that it has responded to ‘increased demand for Belarusian cement in Central Europe in 2019’ by opening an office in Warsaw, Poland. Belarus Daily News has reported that one purported aim of the office is to court supply contracts with ‘European, Polish, German and other partners.’

Both Krichevtsementnoshifer and Krasnoselskstrojmaterialy, the remaining two of Belarus’s three cement producers, have reportedly concluded preliminary agreements for export of their cement to Poland in 2020.

Tajikistan: Tajikistan continued to import a small volume of cement in 2019, despite a year-on-year increase in the production and export. The country produced 4.2Mt of cement, 0.4Mt (10.5%) more than in 2018. 20,000t of cement was imported into the country in 2019, especially white cement, which is not produced in Tajikistan.

Exports of cement rose during 2019 to 1.5Mt, at a value of US$68.1m. 980,000t were exported to Uzbekistan, 576,000t were exported to Afghanistan and 80,600t were exported to Kyrgyzstan.

Tunisia: Carthage Cement has obtained CE marking for its products to help it penetrate the European market. It plans to start a 0.15Mt cement export contract in March 2020.

Turkey: Sabanci Holding and HeidelbergCement joint subsidiary Akçansa achieved an undisclosed Turkish record figure for nine-month cement exports over the period ending 30 September 2019. The exports included 1Mt of clinker. Akçansa general manager Umat Zenar said, “We achieved a 46% increase in our port capacity utilisation rate,” in attributing the growth to its logistics advantage over competitors and effective port management.

Last month Soyuzcement, the Union of Russian Cement Producers, reported that cement production was on course to grow by 8% year-on-year to 58Mt in 2019. This estimate was based on growth from January to October 2019 followed by a modest rise in November.

Graph 1: Cement production in Russia, 2010 – 2019. Source: CM Pro, Ernst & Young.

The pickup is significant because it’s the country’s first annual resumption of growth since 2014. At that time low commodity prices, a worsening economy and international sanctions broke a fairly steady growth cycle that had started in 2000. The only blip in that run was the global economic downturn around 2008. In the medium to long term Soyuzcement’s review pinpointed growth drivers as being government-backed residential housing schemes, integrated land development projects and an increase in the construction of concrete roads. This increase has been driven by consumption growth in most regions, led by a 12% rise in the Central Federal District although the Volga Federal District started to slow in the second half of 2019.

Figure 1: Russian Federal Districts by cement production in 2016. Source: Soyuzcement.ru.

Anecdotally, this change in the fortunes of the Russian cement industry can be seen in the volume of news coverage on the Global Cement website over the last few years. The mean number of news stories on the country in 2016 and 2017, increased by half in 2018 and then again in 2019. Partly this is down to our attempts to increase our coverage of the region but it also shows a general trend. In the news specifically there haven’t been many new plant projects domestically but there has been a steady stream of upgrades and maintenance related stories. For example, Eurocement subsidiary Kavkazcement reported in recent weeks that it had installed a replacement dry kiln. This has been part of a group of upgrades that Eurocement has started in 2019. On the supplier side both Germany’s Gebr. Pfeiffer and Italy’s Bedeschi opened subsidiaries in Russia in 2019.

One thing that didn’t seem to slow down the growth were mounting tariffs on Russian exports into Ukraine. Russia’s neighbour first blocked imports of cement from Russia in May 2019 due to, what it said was a Russian ban on imports. It then followed this with an antidumping rate of 115% for imported clinker and Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) from Russia. It also penalised imports from Belarus and Moldova, although at lower rates. Russia’s cement export rates seemed untroubled by this, rising by 13.5% year-on-year to 0.8Mt in the first 10 months of 2019. Exports hit of high of just below 2Mt/yr in 2014 but have since stabilised at around 1Mt/yr. Imports reached around 5Mt/yr in the early 2010s and have been slowly declining since then, reaching 1.5Mt in 2018.

The lowered production rate that the Russian cement industry has faced over the last five years has been noteworthy given the apparent low capacity utilisation rate. The Global Cement Directory 2019 records the country as having a production capacity of 111Mt/yr. This gives Russia a capacity utilisation rate of 48% in 2018! Unlike, say, the countries in southern Europe that have had to rationalise their cement industries following the post-2008 decline, Russia may have structural aspects to the industry that have helped protect it from lower utilisation rates. These include relatively low export-import rates and the large size of the country with limited sea access to many regions. Most of its production capacity is located in the west but a sizable minority of plants are based further east across the Ural, Siberian and Far Eastern regions. Even under subdued economic conditions, plants in these places are likely to be less susceptible to foreign imports, for example.

Looking ahead, the question is whether the current growth that the cement industry is enjoying is viable once government spending slows down. Alongside this the industry could also focus on sustainability. As the government announced in early January 2020, the country expects to face both negative and positive effects from climate change. The cement industry could be at the front of this trend if it decides to clean up production and/or move into new markets as the Arctic region opens up.

Angola: Chinese-based Sinotrans has exported 800t of cement on the 1344km railway journey from Cimenfort’s 0.4Mt/yr Lobito grinding plant to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Angola Press Agency has reported that the cement was ground from clinker produced in China. Cimenfort sales coordinator Francisco Idelfrides suggested that the cement company may look to expand its production capacity in 2020. He said it sold 0.3Mt of cement in eastern Angola and the DRC in 2019.

Spain: Total cement consumption fell to 1.1Mt in November 2019, down by 8.3% from 1.2Mt in the previous November. CIC Architecture and Sustainability Online has reported that this was 2019’s third month to show a decrease compared to 2018 figures, and the sharpest year-on-year decline so far. The year-on-year decrease for the 11 months to 30 November 2019 is 6.8%. Production failed to show growth, with imports bridging the supply gap. Clinker alone has grown by over 100% to imports of 0.5Mt in the same 11 months from over 0.2Mt in the corresponding period of 2018. Exports, which have declined over 30 consecutive months, fell by 30% year-on-year in November 2019 to under 0.5Mt from over 0.6Mt one year previously. This brings the decline for the year so far to 22% year-on-year to 5.8Mt from 7.4Mt in the first 11 months of 2018. Oficemen president Víctor García Brosa explained that energy prices were a contributing factor to Spain’s production problems. He said that electricity is ‘27% more expensive than in Germany or France.’