Displaying items by tag: Capacity

Honduras: Cementos del Norte has inaugurated its new Mill No. 4 at the Río Bijao plant in Choloma, Cortés, according to a social media post by the producer. The new unit adds 140t/hr of cement production capacity, raising the plant’s total capacity to 7000t/day.

Jamaica: TCL Group subsidiary Caribbean Cement has commissioned its US$42m debottlenecking project at its Rockfort plant in East Kingston. The capacity of the expanded kiln was not disclosed.

During a ribbon cutting ceremony, Prime Minister of Jamaica Andrew Holness said “When we invest in our factories, we invest in our families. When we strengthen our production capacity, we strengthen our national development. This project does more than support housing. It supports jobs. The expanded kiln will enable higher throughput, greater efficiencies, and potentially more stable employment for hundreds of workers.’

He added “Instead of importing, we will be exporting. Instead of consuming value-added goods, we will be producing them. This is the shift from dependency to self-determination.”

Minister of Industry, Investment and Commerce Aubyn Hill said “Everywhere you go, cement is being used, and Caribbean Cement is doing a great job! We want every bag of cement used in Jamaica to be made here because, for every bag that we import, we send jobs overseas. Our job in Jamaica is to keep jobs here.”

India: UltraTech Cement has commissioned its second cement grinding mill at the Maihar unit in Madhya Pradesh, adding 1.8Mt/yr to its domestic production capacity. The first mill at the site began operations in March 2025.

The expansion raises UltraTech’s total grey cement capacity in India to 186.86Mt/yr and 192.26Mt/yr globally. The company said the move forms ‘part of its larger strategy.’

It’s not every week that a ‘new’ cement producer gains hold of nearly 30Mt/yr of production capacity.¹ Back in 2022, a few readers studying the North America pages of the year’s Global Cement Directory probably wondered “Where’s Lafarge gone?” following the dissolution of the France-based producer’s corporate identity into Holcim in June 2021. Now, in the upcoming Global Cement Directory 2026, readers will be able to search in vain for another name among the cement maps of Canada and the US – that of Holcim itself. A decade on from the completion of the Lafarge/Holcim merger, the combination of the two in North America has precipitated something entirely new: Amrize.

On 23 June 2025, Amrize assumed the entire business of Canada and US market leader Holcim North America, following its successful spin-off from Switzerland-based Holcim. Amrize occupies its predecessor’s operational headquarters in Chicago, US, with registered offices in Zug, Switzerland, and is dual-listed in the US and Switzerland.² For those interested in finance, shares in Amrize debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in the US at US$50. Meanwhile on the SIX Swiss Exchange, they dropped by 13% from reference price, to US$49.30, while those in its erstwhile parent rose by 14%.

Table 1 (below) gives the relative size of the entities, based on their latest published figures and the Global Cement Directory 2025. Amrize and Holcims’ respective percentages of the former Holcim total are given in brackets:

Metric                                     Amrize                        Rump Holcim            TOTAL

Integrated cement plants     18 (17%)                     88 (83%)                     106

Capacity                                 28.7Mt/yr (11%)          224.9Mt/yr (89%)        253.6Mt/yr

Employees                             19,000 (29%)              46,000 (71%)              65,000                        

Revenues                               US$7.85bn (24%)       US$24.95 (76%)         US$32.8bn

Amrize chair and CEO Jan Jenisch stated the company’s aims in a post to LinkedIn: to be partner of choice for the US$2tn/yr North American construction sector, to deliver ‘advanced’ materials ‘from foundation to rooftop’ and to serve customers in every province and state.³ This paraphrases Amrize’s Five Strategic Drivers: 100% North America focus; unparalleled footprint and resources; value creation; unlocking growth and driving shareholder value. The menu on the company website offers not ‘products,’ but ‘solutions,’ categorised by type of construction. For cement, users can navigate to Our Businesses > Building Materials > Cement.⁴ Behind this new messaging, the Canadians and Americans who rely on Amrize’s cement business might like to know what exact role cement will play.

Holcim’s global cement revenues first fell below 50% of group sales in 2024, at US$16.4bn (49%). In North America, its recent acquisitions include both those within the cement value chain (British-Columbia based Langley Concrete Group in June 2025) and outside it (OX Engineered Products in November 2024).

Amrize is organised into Building Materials (cement, concrete, aggregates and asphalt) and Building Envelope (insulation, roofing, sealants and weatherproofing). It operates in five regions: Central (Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and inland US west of the Mississippi, from Missouri to Nevada northward), Great Lakes (Ontario and the US Midwest), Northeast (Quebec, Nova Scotia and the eastern US from Maryland northward), Pacific (British Columbia, California, Oregon and Washington) and South (southern US, west to Arizona, and Ohio).

Setting aside its extensive grinding and logistics infrastructure, the geographical footprint of North America’s largest cement producer breaks down as follows:

Region            Integrated cement plants     Capacity

Central           4                                              9.8

South              5                                              7.6

Northeast       5                                              5.5

Great Lakes   3                                              4.7

Pacific            1                                              1.1

TOTAL            18                                            28.7

Four of these geographies – all except South – are transnational. This at a time when Canada and the US are diverging in industrial policy and engaged in a trade war… Supposedly, regional directors will be juggling ambitious projects like Amrize’s on-going Bath, Ontario, and Richmond, British Columbia, carbon capture projects in Canada with a complement of lower-cost strategies in the US.

Just as important for the future of the company is the team in charge. Leadership is structured similarly to Holcim, with some names even reprising the same role. Chair and CEO Jan Jenisch previously chaired Holcim from May 2023, and was its CEO between September 2023 and April 2024. Jenisch first joined Holcim from Switzerland-based Sika, where he had been CEO, in 2017. He obtained his Master’s of Business Administration degree from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, though Jenisch is in fact a German national.

Ian Johnston steps into the Amrize chief financial officer (CFO) position. A long-time Lafarge and Holcim mover in North America, he holds an accountancy degree from the University of Ottawa in Canada. Building Materials division president Jaime Hill came up through the Holcim corporate structure in the group’s Latin America region, including stints as CEO of Holcim Colombia in 2015 – 2019 and Holcim Mexico in 2019 – 2024, before entering the North American region as regional head in September 2024. However, his familiarity with the region goes back to his completion of a bachelor’s in Business Administration, Management and Marketing at Georgetown University in Washington, US.

Nollaig Forrest was Holcim’s chief sustainability officer (CSO) in September 2023 – June 2025; Amrize doesn’t have one. Instead, Forrest moves across to the chief marketing and corporate affairs officer spot. It’s possible that her intended role had a larger sustainability component during planning in 2024, that might have been struck off after US President Donald Trump withdrew his country from the Paris Accords and suspended, then withdrew, new decarbonisation funding. If this is correct, then Amrize may be giving strategic primacy to the larger US over Canada. Whatever the case, its enormous undertakings towards reaching net zero in Canada do not appear to have a dedicated champion on the leadership team. Forrest is another European, and brings leadership experience at chemicals companies Firmenich, Dow and Dupont and the World Economic Forum, grounded in a master’s in International Relations from the Geneva Graduate Institute in her home country of Switzerland.

Also of interest is Patrick Cleary, who steps up as senior vice president commercial cement for the US, and previously worked with Holcim US and LafargeHolcim US in Chicago. Only cement has a dedicated commercial director at this level, and then only in the US. Meanwhile, Samuel Poletti will serve as chief strategy and mergers and acquisitions. He was previously Holcim’s head of mergers and acquisitions since July 2018, before which time he was high up in the group’s South Asia subregion, including serving as Ambuja Cements’ head of strategy and commercial development in India. Poletti, presumably, will be responsible for sustaining the inorganic growth of the Holcim North America era. The flip side of this strategy for Holcim was flash market exits, including from Brazil, Zimbabwe and India in 2022. Insofar as there is a pattern to Holcim’s geographical realignment, it may be towards growth in ‘mature markets’ – a description to which all of Amrize’s regions conform. Ultimately, Amrize is a whole different company to Holcim. Whatever strategy the team is going in with, there is likely to be a transition phase and time needed to feel things out.

Overall, the Amrize leadership displays a thorough grounding in the Holcim way of doing things and a record of responsibility in a variety of its markets. Above them sits the board, with Nicholas Gangestad beside chair Jan Jenisch as lead independent director. Amrize’s 10-seat board includes four (40%) women: Theresa Drew, Holli Ladhani, Katja Roth Pellanda and Maria Cristina Wilbur.

Amrize has arisen. What makes the spin-off so interesting, besides its unprecedented scale, is the strangeness of the market into which it emerges. Spin-off plans went public in January 2024, at a time when the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) were set to unleash over US$1.9tn in additional public spending into the medium-term future. This is not now going to happen. Yet Amrize’s new website proclaims that “The US and Canada are modernising their infrastructure” for ‘greater efficiency and resilience.’ Of course, building materials consumption will continue in other forms, but the level of visibility is less than ideal. One of Holcim’s partner start-ups, Sublime Systems, appeared on a government list on 30 May 2025 and lost US$87m funding at a stroke.

As for Holcim, it enters the second half of the 2020s in a different shape to that in which it began the decade. Only the geographical signature of its North and West African and Latin American subsidiaries (as well as in Bangladesh and the Philippines) confirm this European producer as having once been the closest thing ever to a global cement hegemon. Holcim’s Latin American holdings look distinctly peripheral without the multi-megatonne bookends of Holcim Brazil and, now, Holcim US.

Amrize inherits an environmental, social and governance (ESG) apparatus from Holcim that suits Canada but is now inappropriate for the US. It has chosen to strip out sustainability from its corporate structure, messaging and Strategic Drivers. The wisdom of this decision can only be measured in the longer term. On the other hand, Amrize’s efforts to mitigate its impacts may continue quietly, in a kind of reverse greenwashing – ‘brownwashing’? – until political conditions are suitable to emphasise them once again.

References

1. Global Cement Directory 2025, www.globalcement.com/directory

2. Amrize, ‘Contact Us,’ accessed 25 June 2025, www.amrize.com/us/en/contact-us.html

3. Jan Jenisch, post to LinkedIn, 23 June 2025, www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7342995000399421440/

4. Amrize, ‘Our Cement,’ accessed 25 June 2025, www.amrize.com/us/en/our-businesses/building-materials/cement.html

India: Adani Group subsidiary Ambuja Cements has commissioned a 2.4Mt/yr expansion to one of its West Bengal cement facilities. Reuters has reported that the move raises the producer's total installed capacity to 103Mt/yr.

Sri Lanka: Tokyo Cement Group has opened a new 1Mt/yr grinding plant in Trincomalee, Daily FT News has reported. The move raises the producer's capacity by 33%, to 4Mt/yr. Japan-based Mitsubishi Ube Cement Corporation was technical partner for the construction of the plant, which was executed entirely by Tokyo Cement Group’s in-house engineering teams.

Iraq: The Ministry of Industry and Minerals plans to establish new cement plants with a total production capacity of 52Mt/yr, according to Iraqi News. Ministry spokesperson Doha Al-Jabouri said Iraq’s existing plants currently produce 32Mt/yr. The strategy responds to growing domestic demand and ongoing construction projects and aims to meet future requirements through integrated plant development.

Prime minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani launched six new cement plants in Muthanna province in April 2025 worth US$1.171bn. Al-Sudani said the goal is to meet local demand and end cement imports.

Kyrgyzstan: President Sadyr Japarov has launched a new 0.8Mt/yr clinker production line at the Kant Cement plant. The project created over 300 new jobs and is expected to increase cement supply to the domestic construction industry. Construction of the dry-process line began in early 2024, with equipment supplied by China's Beijing Triumph International Engineering, a subsidiary of Sinoma. US$50m of the US$61m total investment was provided by the Eurasian Development Bank. In 2024, the plant produced 1.15Mt of cement.

President Japarov said “The launch of the new line is not just another production facility. It is a symbol of our industrial growth, professionalism of domestic engineers and workers, and, most importantly, the trust of investors in our country.”

Philippines: Just 53% of domestic cement production capacity is in use, according to Cement Manufacturers of the Philippines president Reinier Dizon, who raised concerns over the long-term sustainability of local producers amid an increase in ‘cheap’ imports.

Dizon spoke during a Tariff Commission public hearing, of which five days are scheduled until 20 June 2025, examining the imposition of definitive safeguard measures on imported Portland and blended cement.

The Department of Trade and Industry imposed a provisional safeguard in February 2025, following a preliminary finding that the rise in imports caused serious injury to the domestic industry between 2019 and June 2024. Vietnam and Indonesia, which supply 93% and 5% of imports respectively, were not exempted, while China, which supplies 1%, was.

Global: Cumulative investment in carbon capture and storage (CCS) will reach US$80bn over the next five years, according to risk management company DNV’s new Energy Transition Outlook: CCS to 2050 report. DNV forecasts that CCS capacity will quadruple by 2030, driven initially by pilot projects in North America and Europe, but now seeing a sharp increase in capacity. As the technologies mature and scale, DNV expects that the average costs will drop by an average of 40% by 2050. The report also states that CCS will grow from 41Mt CO₂/yr captured and stored today to 1.3Bnt CO₂/yr in 2050.

CEO of energy systems at DNV Ditlev Engel said “Carbon capture and storage technologies are a necessity for ensuring that CO₂ emitted by fossil-fuel combustion is stopped from reaching the atmosphere and for keeping the goals of the Paris Agreement alive. DNV’s first Energy Transition Outlook: CCS to 2050 report clearly shows that we are at a turning point in the development of this crucial technology.”