Displaying items by tag: India

India: Dalmia Bharat's income has risen by 14% year-on-year to US$577m in the first half of its financial year, which ended on 30 September 2016, from US$505m in the same period of the previous financial year. Its earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) rose by 28% to US$135m from US$105m. Its sales volumes rose by 21% to 7.18Mt from 5.95Mt. The cement producer explained that it had focused on building up existing capacity and entering new markets in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh during the period.

India: Birla Corporation’s sales revenue has risen by 6.2% to US$280m in the first half of its financial year, which ended on 30 September 2016, from US$263m in the same period of 2015. Its net profit more than tripled to US$22.3m from US$7.04m. Sales from its cement division rose by 5.6% to US$256m from US$242m. No comment on the results was given but in August 2016 Birla completed its acquisition of Reliance Infrastructure for US$702m.

India: The Telangana state government has signed an agreement with 32 cement companies to procure 2.73Mt of cement to build residential housing. The government plans to build 260,000 double-bedroom houses for disadvantaged residents in the state, according to the Indo-Asian News Service. The Telangana Housing Corporation will implement the scheme.

India: My Home Industries has launched a new logo for its flagship brand Maha Cement. “We have been around for nearly 18 years and our logo for our flagship brand Maha Cement has remained that of an old-style muscle man. But change is always required. The new logo has replaced the muscleman with a modern technician attesting for its quality,” said S Sambasiva Rao, Executive Director of My Home Industries in an interview with the New Indian Express newspaper. The joint venture between India’s My Home Group and Ireland’s CRH is expanding its business and building a 1.2Mt/yr plant at Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu.

India: Engineering firm Larsen & Toubro (L&T) laid off 14,000 employees between April and September 2016 or about 11% of its workforce. The reduction in its employees has been done to remove ‘redundant’ jobs, according to the New Indian Express newspaper. Both revenue and profit for the company as a whole and for its Heavy Engineering division rose for the first half of 2016.

India: Demonetisation policy is expected to reduce cement demand by 15 – 20% until the end of 2016. It will then reduce growth by 3% in the last quarter of the Indian financial year that runs until the end of March 2017, according to a report by Deutsche Bank Markets Research. It added that investors forecast the drop in short-term demand to be ‘severe.’

Research Analyst Chockalingam Narayanan said that he expected demand from infrastructure projects to partially offset weakness in the residential sector. However, investment towards these projects may be impaired where the revenue comes from state government. These bodies rely on up to 10% of their revenue from the property sector that may be adversely effected by demonetisation. Local bodies are responsible for projects such as rural roads, urban development projects, affordable housing, irrigation and more. Larger road and railway budgets are mostly controlled by central government agencies and are expected to be less effected.

India: Shree Cement has denied that it is in talks to buy a majority stake in Shiva Cement describing media reports as ‘purely speculative.’ Local media had reported that Shree was considering buying Shiva for around US$0.22/share.

Shiva Cement has a 0.2Mt/yr cement plant near Rourkela in Sundergarh district in Odisha with on-going plans to upgrade the site to 1Mt/yr. The company also has captive limestone reserves in the area and produces both Sumangal

India: LafargeHolcim has increased its shareholding in Ambuja Cement and ACC via its subsidiary Holderind Investments. It now owns 63% of Ambuja Cement’s shares and 4.5% of ACC’s shares. The group will pay for the additional stakes in Indian Rupees. The impact on LafargeHolcim’s net debt will be Euro302m. It described India as one of LafargeHolcim’s key markets with solid long-term fundamentals and a clear potential for further improvement in business performance.

Togo/Benin: Bharat Heavy Electricals (BHE) has been awarded an order by Norway’s Scancem International, part of Heidelberg Cement group, to supply motors for Ciments Du Togo and Cimbenin. The motors will be manufactured and supplied by BHE's Bhopal plant.

India: Dalmia Cement has committed to 100% renewable power and joined RE100, an initiate between the Climate Group and CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project). The new additions to RE100 take the total number of members to 83, and the total demand for renewable electricity being created to over 100TWhr.

“Being one of the greenest cement companies in the world, we are committed to decarbonising our operations in a way that makes business sense. We are scaling up our ambition to make a long term transition to 100% renewable power, achieving a fourfold increase in the percentage of renewable energy in our electricity consumption by 2030,” said Mahendra Singhi, Group CEO and Whole Time Director at Dalmia Cement (Bharat).

After adding 8MW solar photovoltaic capacity for its captive use, Dalmia Cement has set an interim target to increase its percentage of renewable energy consumption fourfold by 2030 compared to 2015, according to the Business Standard newspaper. Around 7% of the electricity used by Dalmia Cement, from the national grid and in-house generation, is based on renewable energy. Around 40% of the group’s locally generated power is based on renewables.