Displaying items by tag: Project

St Helena/Namibia: Ohorongo Cement has supplied 24,604t of cement towards the construction of the first-ever airport at St Helena island in the South Atlantic Ocean. It will continue to supply cement until the project is finished. The US$419m project is being developed by Basil Read and covers construction of the St Helena Airport and Permanent Wharf. Completion is planned by February 2016, according to local media.

Other projects the Namibian cement producer is supplying include the Husab Mine, Neckertal Dam, Walvis Bay Namport Harbour Project, an acid plant at Tsumeb and construction projects in Zambia and Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The company enjoys infant industry protection awarded by the Namibian government in 2013 for eight years. It recently announced that the Development Bank of Namibia had increased its stake to 11.72%.

India: Shree Cement is setting up a 2.8Mt/yr cement plant at Sikandrabad in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh. The plant will also include a 18MW captive power plant.

Zimbabwe/Africa: Aliko Dangote, President of Nigeria's Dangote Cement, has announced plans to open a US$400m cement plant in Zimbabwe. He also announced plans to invest in coal mining and power generation in the country.

"We've already decided to invest into Zimbabwe. That's why we are here," said Dangote following meetings with Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe and Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa. "Any country we visit means, 'Yes, we've decided to invest,'" Dangote told journalists in Harare.

Construction is due to start in the first quarter of 2016, following the granting of government permission. Once constructed, the plant will produce 1.5Mt/yr of cement.

More widely, Dangote has also stated that investments in new plants across Africa are expected to increase the company's cement capacity to 100Mt/yr by 2020. Dangote said that Africa needs to increase its per capita consumption of cement in order to aid infrastructural development, stimulate further demand and force down rising cost of the commodity.

Nicaragua: Cemex has announced that it will open a new grinding plant in Managua department, Nicaragua by the end of August 2015. The facility required an investment of US$30m and is expected to double the firm's output in the country. This inauguration is part of an expansion strategy with a total allocation of US$55m, which will be developed by 2017.

Pakistan: Attock Cement has released its results for the 2015 Pakistani fiscal year, which ended on 30 June 2015. The company earned a net profit of US$21.7m, a 9.5% increase on the US$19.6m that it made in the year to 30 June 2014. Its revenue rose by 4.3%, from US$122.7m to US$127.6m.

The results were released at the same time as an announcement of the company's expansion plans. In a notice sent to the Karachi Stock Exchange, Attock Cement announced the expansion of its production capacity by installing a US$120m cement kiln line at its existing facility in Hub, Balochistan.

Attock Cement is the third cement manufacturer to announce an expansion after DG Khan Cement and Cherat. There is anticipation that the government will shortly ramp up infrastructure developments, leading to anticipation that there will be higher demand for cement in the coming years.

Ethiopia: After some delay and with construction of its original project still ongoing, Habesha Cement is reported to be considering an additional expansion project. The firm hired Waas international Consulting Firm (WICF) in June 2015 to conduct a study to change its market strategy and establish the need for further expansion projects even though the construction of its 1.3Mt/yr cement plant is not yet complete.

WICF, which previously worked on the feasibility study for the overall company, will decide on the need for expansion by looking at the current demand for cement in the country and will restructure Habesha's market strategy accordingly. "We found it necessary to conduct the study because we expect to launch production and join the market in the coming year," said Mesfin Abadi, chief executive director of Habesha Cement, who added that the company's initial market strategy dated from 2013 and did not provide adequate information on market trends past 2015.

Rwanda: Cimerwa has officially unveiled its new 0.6Mt/yr dry process cement plant. It hopes that the new technology will help it to reduce its production costs and better compete with imported cement from Rwanda's neighbours. The plant previously relied on wet process technology.

Cimerwa has also installed a 15MW peat-powered power plant, which will help it address unreliable electrical supplies that have caused it to suffer high production costs for many years.

The small cement industry of Mozambique, in south west Africa must be an interesting place to make cement. On one side the country's producers, like their more vocal South African counterparts, have been fighting off cheap imports from Iran, Pakistan, China et al. On the other side of the coin though, Mozambique has growing domestic demand and is within striking distance of growing markets further into Africa, like Malawi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

With the announcement this week that there will be not one but two new integrated cement plants in the country, bringing over 2Mt/yr of new capacity, everything should be set fair for the coming years then, shouldn't it? Domestic production will rise, the price of local cement will fall as a result, competition from imports will drop off and money will be made from new exports.

Except that might not happen. Before the announcement of these two plants, (one of which does not state a capacity), there was around 5.5Mt/yr of grinding and integrated capacity either currently active in Mozambique or due to come onstream in 2015. With the new projects this rises to over 7.5Mt/yr.

The desirable chain of events described above starts to break down due to the fact that domestic demand in Mozambique, while rising, is not currently anywhere near as high as domestic supply. The United States Geological Survey estimated that the country produced just 1.2Mt/yr in 2012. Data for 2013 and 2014, though unavailable, is highly unlikely to show a three-fold increase. Indeed Insitec, a minority shareholder in Cimentos de Moçambique, predicted in 2014 that demand for that year would rise to just 1.5Mt, before hitting the dizzying heights of 1.8Mt in 2018 – And that's still three years away!

So what are the options? Option 1: Some or all of the planned and mooted cement plants will fail to come to fruition. Option 2: Some or all of the plants will be built but will operate at reduced capacity and/or on a campaign basis. Option 3: The Mozambican cement industry becomes a regional powerhouse and starts to export to its neighbours.

Option 1 is certainly possible. Limak Group, one of the parties linked to the new projects, is a Turkish cement producer that is inexperienced outside of Turkey. There has also been a lack of information on the progress of projects by Austral Cimentos ('coming on stream in 2015'), Star Cement and Consolidated Building Materials, although a lack of progress reports does not necessarily imply 'no progress.'

Option 2 is more likely, as some producers already operate on a campaign basis. InterCement's plant at Nacala, formerly an integrated plant, currently operates only as a grinding station. Option 3 is also possible, with Malawi particularly lacking in cement production facilities.
In reality a combination of all three 'Options' is the most likely outcome. However, this will lead to Mozambique becoming yet another player in an increasingly busy African cement market. The desire for self-sufficiency in cement production, a common goal for the region's governments, can easily lead to over-estimates of local demand growth, with resultant over-capacity. Of course the expectation that all African countries can get rid of this extra cement capacity via exports will ultimately backfire.

In southern Africa we already have South Africa exporting. Angola declared 'cement self-sufficiency' in October 2014 and banned imports at the start of 2015. Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and DRC all have large-scale Dangote and/or PCC projects near completion or in production that will greatly reduce their need for imports. Meanwhile, further north, Nigeria is already a gigantic producer and significant cement exporter. Cameroon has recently banned imports and Ghana is thinking of doing the same. Over in the east of Africa, Ethiopia's (and the rest of that region's) rapidly-developing situation was covered in this column just two weeks ago.

Finally, in the north of Africa, Algeria has declared its intention to be self-sufficient in cement by 2016. This news must have 'gone down like a lead balloon' in Italy, Spain and Greece, which have been reliant on north African markets after the bottoms fell out of their own economies. In the north east, Egypt has different problems at present, also described previously. It needs fuel not cement!

So where does this all lead for regional cement dynamics in Africa? Well perhaps the situation in India points the way. There, as in Africa, local and regional producers with the desire to expand grew from their local bases and eventually overlapped. Against a backdrop of lower-than-expected demand, the country now has overcapacity. This has resulted in smaller producers being acquired and leaving the market.

Could this eventually happen in Africa? Only time will tell. However one thing is certain: It's just not possible for every country to export to every other country!

US: Lafarge North America has signed a deal to build a cement trans-loading facility in Williston, North Dakota. According to local press, the storage facility and terminal will be located on a new rail spur on the east side of the town. Lafarge North America says that it will allow the company to better serve its customers amid growing demand for construction materials in North Dakota and South Dakota

Roy Sander, general manager of Lafarge Dakotas, noted that the new rail line will remove the company's existing truck traffic from US Highway 2.

North and South Dakota are growing states for cement consumption. As well as traditional construction cements for standard applications, the presence of the Bakken oil field means that the states also require oil well cements and products for soil stabilisation.