Displaying items by tag: Russia

Russia: Yakutcement has commissioned a crushed stone conveyor to circulate crushed stone of a 200 - 400mm fraction for secondary crushing at the 0.4Mt/yr Yakutcement plant in Mokhsogollokh. Yakutcement has said that the installation will save on the costs of a front-end loader and dump truck for conveying crushed stone to and from a temporary warehouse prior to secondary crushing.

Russia: Sibirsky Cement Holding (Sibtsem) subsidiary Topkinsky Cement has announced that it has entered commercial production of a new Mita slag Portland cement with granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS) at its 2.7Mt/yr integrated plant in Topki, for which it received a certification of conformity with ‘cement for general construction’ standards on 16 January 2020. Nina Poputnikova, Topkinsky Cement laboratory and quality department head, said that it is producing the cement in response to ‘construction companies’ increased interest in cement for use in reinforced, precast concrete in monolithic structures such as buried and hydraulic structures.’

“In the near future we plan to certify two new cements,” said Topkinsky Cement managing director Alexey Ospelnikov. One will be a low-heat general-purpose cement for large-sized concrete structures and the other a sulphate-resistant Portland cement. “Expanding the assortment will help strengthen the company’s position in the Russian cement market.”

Russia: Eurocement has announced the continuation of its cooperation agreement with construction company PIK Group in 2020. The 30.7Mt/yr-capacity cement producer, Russia’s largest, sold 0.2Mt of cement to PIK Group in 2019, bringing the total volume exchanged in the course of their cooperation to 0.8Mt. Eurocement sales vice president Ilya Kosykh said, “We guarantee our customers stable cement performance and uninterrupted deliveries of building materials on time.”

Russia: KuzbassTransCement’s total volume of cement transported by rail in 2019 was 2.98Mt – up by 8% from 2.76Mt in 2018. Throughout the year, it implemented upgrades worth US$29m to its transportation facilities, including the lease of an additional 145 covered wagons, 346 cement hoppers and 90 dump cars, representing roughly a 14% expansion to its fleet.

Finland: Machinery manufacturer Metso Corporation has announced plans to consolidate its European warehouse operations, currently spread over Norway, Sweden, the UK, France, Spain, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Russia, into a single location. Metso Corporation customer logistics senior vice president Jarkko Aro said the move ‘would also enable considerable savings in end-to-end freight costs and reduced CO2 emissions.’ 40 employees are potentially affected. Metso Corporation has not disclosed any locations under consideration for the facility.

Russia: Siberian Cement’s production increased by 3.0% year-on-year to 3.2Mt in 2019 from 3.1Mt in 2018. The company estimated that demand over the period in Siberia, Buryatia and the Trans-Baikal region grew by 4.4% year-on-year to 5.3Mt/yr from below 5.1Mt/yr in 2018. Siberian Cement owner Sibtsem Holding Company’s first vice president Gennady Rasskazov suggested mining and metallurgical projects, the bridging of the River Ob and infrastructure development for the World Youth Hockey Championship 2023 as factors contributing to the rise in demand.

Russia: ASK Cement is set to begin development of a new integrated cement plant on a greenfield site near Yekaterinburg in Sverdlovsk Oblast. Germany-based Aumund has announced that it will supply KZB and KZB-Q pan conveyors, BZB bucket apron conveyors, SDG clinker silo discharge gates, BWZ chain bucket elevators and BWG-L belt bucker elevators to the project in early 2020. Aumund designed the line in collaboration with ASK Cement and its engineering partner Sibniiproject Cement Design Institute.

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.

Iran: Cement producers in Iran reported growth of 22% year-on-year in exports of cement and clinker over the eight months between 21 March 2019 and 21 November 2019 to 11.4Mt from 9.34Mt. The Financial Tribune newspaper has reported that 37 countries received Iranian cement or clinker over the period. The leading importers of cement were Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Russia. Clinker markets included Iraq, the UAE and China.

Russia: Eurocement subsidiary Kavkazcement has installed and commissioned a dry kiln to replace its reserve kiln at its plant in the Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia. The new kiln is part of a Euro5.79m investment which will increase the current 3.1Mt/yr integrated plant’s capacity by over 40% to 4.4Mt/yr when commissioned in mid-2020. Oleg Lopatin, Kavkazcement director general, said “A significant increase in the plant’s workload was made possible by the high demand for our cements.”