Displaying items by tag: Sinoma International Engineering

Indonesia: Denmark’s FLSmidth is expected to secure a contract with Hongshi Holding Group to supply equipment for a new cement plant at Jember in East Java. Lu Jianlong, a manager at Hongshi's equipment supply department, told Inside International Industrials that the US$40m deal is due to be signed by the end of June 2018.

The project has a total investment of US$315m. Sinoma (Suzhou) Construction, a subsidiary of Sinoma International Engineering, is the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor for the project. Atlas Copco and Kawasaki Heavy Industries will also be providing equipment for the plant. The project will include a 12MW waste heat power generation system.

Saudi Arabia: Sinoma International Engineering has agreed to pay an outstanding tax bill of US$3.5m to the Saudi tax bureau. The bill relates to a dispute in 2009 and 2010. The settlement includes delay charges and further charges are applicable if the bill is not paid by the end of June 2018. In 2016 the subsidiary of China national Building Materials (CNBM) was appealing against a charge of US$18m for unpaid tax in the mid 2000s.

Pakistan: Germany’s Loesche has sold four vertical roller mills (VRM) to Bestway Cement through China’s Sinoma International Engineering. The mills will be used to upgrade Bestway Cement’s Farooqia plant in the Punjab province. No expected date of commissioning or value for the order has been disclosed.

The order consists of one raw mill, one coal mill and two clinker mills. One four-roller mill VRM with a capacity of 450t/hr will be used to grind cement raw material to a fineness of 12% with sieving residue of R 90μm. Two further mills with a throughput of 170t/hr will serve for the subsequent grinding of cement clinker to a fineness of 3200 Blaine. One large modular VRM with a capacity of 40t/hr will be used in the grinding of coal to a fineness of 10% and R 90μm sieving residue.

Nigeria: Germany’s Gebr. Pfeiffer has struck a deal to sell a MVR 6000 R-4 mill for raw material grinding and a MPS 3350 BK mill for processing coal for kiln firing for Dangote Cement’s new plant at Okpella in Edo State. The mill order is the first for Gebr. Pfeiffer from the Nigerian cement producer. The order was placed by the China’s Sinoma International Engineering.

The MVR mill featuring a total drive power of 4000kW will be grinding 550t/hr of cement raw material to a fineness of 10% R 90µm. The MPS 3350 BK with a drive power of 1100kW is designed for a throughput rate of 50 - 70t/hr and will grind Nigerian coal, imported coal and/or pet coke, to a fineness of 12% R 90µm. Gebr. Pfeiffer’s own staff will supervise erection and commissioning.

Nigeria: Dangote Cement will use two vertical roller mills (VRM) from Germany’s Loesche for a new production line at its Obajana plant in Kogi State. The order comprises a six-roller mill for raw cement meal with a capacity of 580t/hr, the largest roller mill for raw material in the Loesche range, and a three-roller mill with a modular design featuring a drive power range of 1000kW for grinding hard coal and lignite with a throughput of up to 70t/hr.

The scope of delivery also includes a LDC classifier for the raw cement mill and a LSKS ZD classifier for the coal mill, which is characterised by individually adjustable grain size separation. The raw material mill is equipped with metal-matrix-compound (MMX) technology. The two mill gear units are equipped with state monitoring and remote access for remote monitoring. Loesche is also contributing to the design and planning of the entire plant as well as the engineering for the electrical measurement, control and regulation technology and complete automation. The delivery date is scheduled for the third quarter of 2018.

The contract partner for this project is China’s Sinoma International Engineering, which has previously installed a seven clinker and cement raw meal VRMs for the Obajana plant. The site has a cement production capacity of over 12Mt/yr and it is the largest cement plant in Sub-Saharan Africa.

South Africa: PPC and China’s Sinoma Construction have successfully ignited the kiln at the Slurry Kiln 9 project in North West province. The new clinker production line will now undergo a three-month test period, according to the China Economic Daily newspaper. Once testing is finished, the 3300t/day line will be transferred to PPC to start commissioning.

The old joke about buses only coming along in pairs might just apply to Angolan cement plants this week with the inauguration of Nova Cimangola’s new 2.4Mt/yr cement plant in Luanda. It follows the announcement of the start of an upgrade project to build a clinker kiln at Cimenfort’s grinding plant in Benguela. In cement industry terms for a country with a production capacity below 10Mt/yr these projects are right on top of each other!

Nova Cimangola’s new plant has been a well-publicised project internationally. Sinoma International Engineering coordinated the line for US$400m in 21 months using components from well-known suppliers. Loesche provided a number of raw material, cement and coal mills for the project, including the country’s first vertical roller mill, as well as other components and parts. Loesche’s Austrian subsidiary A Tec also got involved as an EPCM (Engineering, Procurement & Construction Management) partner.

Cimenfort’s clinker kiln project is the third phase of a process to turn its grinding plant at Catumbela in Benguela into a fully integrated unit since it opened in 2012. Earlier phases saw the grinding plant’s capacity increase to 1.4Mt/yr from 0.7Mt/yr by using a new roller press. Work on the kiln is now scheduled to start in January 2018 with completion scheduled for 2020.

If Cimenfort makes it to clinker production they will join the country’s three main producers: Nova Cimangola, Fabrica de Cimento do Kwanza Sul (FCKS) and the China International Fund. Getting that far is by no means certain as the Palanca Cement plant project demonstrates. That scheme was backed by Brazil’s Camargo Corrêa, the owners of InterCement, and local business group Gema. However, the regulators bailed out Portugal’s Banco Espírito Santo, the financial backer of the project, in 2014 effectively killing it. Another project that has gone on the back burner is Portugal’s Secil’s plan to build a second plant next to its grinding plant in Lobito. Originally approved by the Angolan government in 2007 the project has been kicked around since then through various revisions to the local investment body. It was last reported as being under consideration by the president’s office of Angola in 2016.

Ministry of Industry figures place cement production capacity at 8.3Mt/yr compared to a consumption of 6Mt/yr. In contrast to this Secil’s parent company Semapa reported that the Angolan cement market contracted in 2016 by 25% to 3.9Mt in line with the poor state of the general economy, pushed down by poor oil prices. It blamed the decrease in cement consumption on a halt in public infrastructure spending and the negative effect that local currency devaluations had on clinker imports and other incoming raw materials. With the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasting economic growth to pick up for Angola in 2017, improvements in the construction and cement sector are expected by Semapa but they hadn’t been seen so far during the first quarter of the year.

The government’s keenness to describe its cement industry as ‘self-sufficient in cement’ mimics calls from other African countries like Nigeria. The Angolan government banned cement imports in 2015, with the exception of certain border provinces, and this has continued into 2017. However, the ban hasn’t stopped the country exporting cement to its neighbours. Earlier this year the head of Cimenterie de Lukala in the Democratic Republic of Congo blamed the closure of his company’s integrated plant on imports from Angola.

All of this leaves an enlarged local cement industry waiting for the good times to come again. In the meantime, exporting cement and clinker no doubt seems like a promising proposition. In the middle of this are projects like those from Cimenfort and Secil that are looking decidedly dicey in the current economic environment. These companies may have just missed the bus to make their upgrades happen. Still, if they wait around long enough, their chance may come again when the market revives.

A Sinoma subsidiary was raking in the big bucks this week with the announcement that it had booked a Euro1.05bn order with the Egyptian government. The order was for six 6000t/day cement production lines plus assorted maintenance contracts from Chengdu Design and Research Institute of Building Materials Industry (CDI).

The order caps a busy month for Sinoma. At the start of June, another subsidiary, CBMI, said that it had picked up deals to build two new lines in Algeria for Groupe des Ciments d’Algérie. Around the same time another project in the country, a joint venture between Lafarge Algeria and Souakri Group, revealed that it had started commissioning its mill. Other assorted cement projects announced so far in 2016 include a waste heat recovery unit for Thai Pride Cement in Thailand, a conversion to coal burning at South Valley Cement in Egypt and various orders for mills via Loesche for Sinoma projects in Vietnam.

The scale of that latest Egyptian order becomes apparent when one looks at Sinoma, or China National Materials Group Corporation’s, annual results. It reported revenue of US$8.08bn in 2015, a slight decrease from US$8.38bn in 2014. Those six lines represent 13% of the group’s entire turnover in 2015. That’s one humongous order. The last time Sinoma signed a cement deal on this magnitude was in August 2015 when Nigerai’s Dangote placed an order at a value of US$1.49bn.

Elsewhere on the balance sheet for 2015, its profit fell markedly by 25% year-on-year to US$150m from US$200m. However, its new order intake grew by 14% to US$5.1bn. Overseas orders accounted for over three quarters of this or US$4.32bn, its highest level on record. This compares to its rival FLSmidth’s new order intake of US$2.8bn in 2015. It declared that it would continue to seek business outside of China in line with the country’s ‘One belt, one road’ policy focusing on Central Asia and South America.

This growth by Chinese engineering companies on the world stage may have been stymied in 2015. The Verband Deutscher Maschinen- und Anlagenbau (VDMA) in Germany reported in April 2016 that the members of its Industrial Plant Manufacturers’ Group (AGAB) had booked orders of Euro19.5bn in 2015, a similar figure to its orders in 2014. This compared to a drop of 63% of large plant orders (not just cement) in 2014 from Euro5.29bn in 2013. AGAB saw opportunity in service industries for its German members as markets stalled in Russia and Brazil, and China’s property market faced its own problems. Research by UBS Evidence Lab, as reported by the Financial Times in May 2016, has taken a different view, suggesting that Chinese construction quarry equipment manufacturers such as Sany, Zoomlion and XCMG were likely to expand their market share outside of China to 15% by 2025. At present the research pegged them at 7%.

Expansion comes with its risks though. In late May 2016 Sinoma International Engineering reported details of a tax dispute it was suffering in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi subsidiary of the company was levelled with a request for unpaid back taxes from 2006 and 2008. At the time it was appealing against a bill of US$18m. In a changing global marketplace some things never change. Global success it seems is taxed.