Displaying items by tag: ThyssenKrupp

Germany: Beumer Group has appointed Alexander Tigges as the director of global sales for its Conveying & Loading Systems division. He succeeds Andrea Prevedello, who was appointed as chief executive officer of Beumer Group Austria earlier in the year. Tigges, aged 51 years, previously worked for Germany-based ThyssenKrupp in product and sales managerial roles for its cement plant manufacturing subsidiary.

There have been two developments from ThyssenKrupp’s ongoing restructuring worth noting by the cement sector in recent weeks. The first is that the Germany-based engineering and steel producer has stopped trying to sell its cement plant division. The second is that Denmark-based FLSmidth is holding serious talks about buying its mining division.

ThyssenKrupp first announced plans for a major restructuring in mid-2019 with an anticipated reduction of 6000 jobs across the business. The sale of its elevator business for Euro17.2bn to private equity was announced in February 2020. Later in May 2020 it then revealed plans to divide its previous business areas into core, dual and multi track segments. Core - including Materials Services, Industrial Components (Forged Technologies and Bearings) and Automotive Technology – would be kept as before. Dual-track – including Steel and Marine – would either be kept as before or considered for consolidation. Multi-track - including cement plant engineering, mining and more – would be sold, added to a partnership or closed. By size, core reported sales of Euro16.1bn (53%) in the company’s 2019 - 2020 financial year, dual-track reported Euro8.8bn (29%) and multi-track reported Euro5.5bn (18%).

Volkmar Dinstuhl, formerly in charge of mergers and acquisitions, was put in charge of Multi-track. By October 2020 he was publicly admitting that the division was planning to “find a solution for all our businesses within the next two years” including cement plant engineering. In the same interview he described the Multi-track division as an internal private equity fund. However, the elevator business sale has been seen by several commentators as giving ThyssenKrupp more freedom around how to conduct its restructuring. Three months later and Handelsblatt, a German business newspaper, reported this week that ThyssenKrupp’s cement plant division may have avoided its multi-track fate. It cited internal communication to employees about what’s been happening with the sale. Principally, orders have picked up in the company’s new financial year, since October 2020, and although a sale has not been ruled out, it won’t be pursued until late 2021 at the earliest. This is potentially good news for the sector as a sign that the market may be improving and definitely good news for those employees working for the division.

As a competitor, FLSmidth would have been expected to be potentially interested in buying either ThyssenKrupp’s mining or cement plant division, or both. So, the only question was, when it made a point of saying publicly that it was in non-binding negotiations to buy mining, what about cement?

Looking at the numbers shows that FLSmidth’s mining division did better than its cement one in the first nine months of 2020 with order take up year-on-year and the mining industry described as being relatively resilient during the coronavirus crisis, with the majority of mines operational across regions. By contrast it pointed out that the cement market was still ‘severely’ impacted by the coronavirus pandemic and that future cement demand was dependent on general economic growth. Acquisition activity in mining certainly seems like the safer bet at the moment. Yet the temptation to neutralise a competitor may have been a strong one. With the mining deal still in progress and the cement sale possibly ended for now, we’ll just have to wait and see. Other buyers for both divisions are no doubt waiting in the wings should circumstances allow.

One final fun fact to consider is that the man put in charge of selling both of ThyssenKrupp’s mining and cement plant divisions, Volkmar Dinstuhl, just happens to be a World Chess Federation (FIDE) recognised International Master. Being good at chess doesn’t automatically confer skill at anything else. Just look at former world champion Gary Kasparov’s political ambitions in Russia for example. Yet, ThyssenKrupp’s elevator division sale has been seen as one of the largest leveraged European buyouts in recent years and has appeared to have bought it some time to mull its options over its cement plant division. With this in mind, any potential buyers for the rest of Multi-track may be wondering just how many moves ahead this seller is thinking.

Germany: ThyssenKrupp has decided not to sell the cement division of its subsidiary ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions after failing to receive a ‘convincing’ offer. The Handelsblatt newspaper has reported that the group is still exploring options for individual subsidiaries under its restructuring programme. It reportedly aims to establish a looser group structure under which individual units enjoy a high degree of independence.

The Germany-based engineering company stared to try and sell the various division of its plant-building business in 2020. However, the source quoted by Handelsblatt also says that orders in ThyssenKrupp’s current financial year, since October 2020, have been recovering, with a several new projects. Separately, Denmark-based FLSmidth said in mid-January 2021 that it had entered into non-binding negotiations with ThyssenKrupp over the possible acquisition of its mining business.

Germany: Denmark-based FLSmidth has entered into non-binding negotiations with ThyssenKrupp over the possible acquisition of its mining business. Mining is one of ThyssenKrupp subsidiary ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions’ major businesses, alongside cement. This business segment reported net sales of Euro2.9bn in its 2020 financial year, a small decline from the sales figure in 2019 despite the coronavirus pandemic.

Germany: The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) has named ThyssenKrupp on its Climate Change A List of companies which took actions to ’cut emissions, reduce climate impacts and help build a low-carbon economy’ in 2020. 269 companies won the top status from a pool of 5800 applicants.

Chief executive officer Martina Merz said, “This is a clear endorsement of our climate strategy. ThyssenKrupp has firmly established itself as a leader in climate protection. We will continue to systematically reduce climate impacts. We see climate protection not just as an obligation but as an opportunity for new
business.”

India: Shiva Cement plans to invest around US$200m towards a new integrated cement plant in Sundergarh district, Odisha. The 1.36Mt clinker unit will also include a 1Mt/yr grinding unit, an 8MW waste heat recovery (WHR) unit, 4Mt/yr crushing plants at its dolomite and limestone quarries, a connecting 10km belt conveyor and a dedicated railway siding with a 12km track to the main network.

ThyssenKrupp Industries India will supply a 4000t/day clinker production line for the project. Larsen & Toubro has been awarded the contract for civil, mechanical and refractory erection work. The unit is expected to create around 500 jobs directly and indirectly. Commissioning is scheduled to take place by March 2022.

Parth Jindal, the managing director of JSW Cement said, "The new clinker unit at Shiva Cement in Odisha will provide a strategic advantage to service the needs of our customers in the region and further strengthen JSW Cement's leadership position in the Green Cement category in India.”

The subsidiary of JSW Cement intends to use the new plant as a strategic hub to access markets in the east of the country. It is part of the group’s aim to achieve a production capacity of 25Mt/yr by 2025.

Germany: ThyssenKrupp has announced the launch of the HPGR Pro, a high-pressure grinding roll for raw materials processing that it says “offers up to 20% more throughput, 15% lower energy consumption and 30% longer-lasting rollers” than previous models. HPGR global product manager Frank Schroers said, “We used our experience and what we learned from conversations with customers to introduce improvements that are unique in this market and make grinding much easier.” Laser monitoring keeps users constantly informed about the roller surface and helps predict the best possible time for roller replacement. “Our customers need no longer stop the machine as a precautionary measure, saving them valuable time. What’s more, as our specialists collect and process machine data, our customers can continually improve their HPGR’s operation and optimise throughput, energy consumption or machine availability in line with their specific targets,” added Schroers.

Vietnam: ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions has announced the relocation of its Asia Pacific cement regional division headquarters to Hanoi from Singapore. The new headquarters are on the site of one of the company’s “largest cement plant engineering centres.” It retains offices in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. The main motivation for the move is to better enable ThyssenKrupp to supply Vietnamese cement producers.

Cement technologies chief executive officer (CEO) Pablo Hofelich said, “In our new headquarters, we bring together experts from Germany, Singapore and Thailand to support the Vietnam office. Vietnam is the largest market in terms of cement production capacity in a dynamic and growing Asia Pacific.” Asia Pacific cement business CEO Lukas Schoeneck said, “We are focusing on know-how transfer and the development of solutions that are tailored to the requirements of the local markets in Asia Pacific. Besides, we will expand our service activities to strengthen our local footprint and proximity to clients. Lastly, we will push sustainable technologies within our Grey2Green initiative.”

Hydrogen and its use in cement production has been adding a dash of colour to the industry news in recent weeks. Last week, Lafarge Zementwerke, OMV, Verbund and Borealis signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to plan and build a full-scale unit at a cement plant in Austria to capture CO₂ and process it with hydrogen into synthetic fuels, plastics or other chemicals. This week, Air Products and ThyssenKrupp Uhde Chlorine Engineers (TUCE) signed a strategic agreement to work together in ‘key regions’ to develop projects supplying green hydrogen. Both of these developments follow the awarding of UK government funding in February 2020 to support a pilot project into studying a mix of hydrogen and biomass fuels at Hanson Cement’s Ribblesdale integrated plant.

As the title of this column suggests there is an environmental colour code to describe how hydrogen is made for industrial use. This is a bit more codified than when grey cement gets called ‘green’ but it pays to remember what the energy source is. So-called ‘green’ hydrogen is produced by the electrolysis of water using renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric or solar, ‘Grey’ hydrogen is made from steam reforming using fossil fuels and ‘Blue’ hydrogen is similar to grey but has the CO₂ emissions from the fuels captured and stored/utilised. Price is seen as the main obstacle to wider uptake of hydrogen usage as a fuel in industry although this is changing as CO₂ pricing mounts in some jurisdictions and the connected supply chain is developed. A study by BloombergNEF from March 2020 forecasted that green hydrogen prices could become cheaper than natural gas by 2050 in Brazil, China, India, Germany and Scandinavia but it conceded that many barriers would have to be overcome to get there. For example, hydrogen has to be manufactured making it more expensive than fossil fuels without government policy support and its, “lower energy density also makes it more expensive to handle.”

The three recent examples with respect to the cement industry are interesting because they are all exploring different directions. The Lafarge partnership in Austria wants to use hydrogen to aid the utilisation side of its carbon capture at a cement plant. The industrial suppliers, meanwhile, are positioning themselves in the equipment space for the technology required to use hydrogen on industrial plants. Secondly, ThyssenKrupp has alkaline water electrolysis technology that it says it has used at over 600 projects and electrochemical plants worldwide. Air Products works with industrial gas production, storage and handling.

Finally, the Hanson project in the UK will actually look at using hydrogen as a partial replacement for natural gas in the kiln combustion system. A Cembureau position paper in mid-2019 identified that the challenges to explore in using hydrogen in cement production included seeing how its use might affect the physical aspects of the kiln system, the fuel mass flows, temperature profile, heat transfer and the safety considerations for the plant. Later that year a feasibility study by the Mineral Products Association (MPA), Verein Deutscher Zementwerke (VDZ) and Cinar for the UK government department that is funding the Hanson project concluded that a hydrogen flame’s high heat in a burner alone might not make it suitable for clinker formation. However, the study did think that it could be used with biomass to address some of that alternative fuel’s “calorific limitations” at high levels. Hence the demonstration of a mixture of both hydrogen and biomass.

That’s all on hydrogen but, finally, if you didn’t log into yesterday’s Virtual Global CemProducer 2 Conference you missed a treat. One highlight was consultant John Kline’s presentation on using drones to inspect refractory in some hard to reach places. Flying a camera straight into a (cool) pyro-processing line was reminiscent of a science fiction film! Global Cement has encountered the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles in quarry and stockpile surveys previously but this was a step beyond.

The proceedings pack - including video, presenter slides and delegate list - for the Virtual Global CemProducer 2 Conference 2020 is available to buy now

Uzbekistan: Akhangarantsement says that it has installed a ThyssenKrupp raw materials grinding unit at the site of an upcoming 5Mt/yr integrated cement plant in Tashkent Region. The equipment consists of a jaw crusher for primary crushing and a hammer mill for secondary crushing. The company said that the upcoming plant will “provide the market with a line of high-quality products for the construction of housing, industrial and infrastructure facilities.”