Displaying items by tag: data

Cyprus: The Statistical Service of Cyprus has stopped reporting data on the cement industry following a request by a local cement producer. It has announced that to safeguard ‘statistical confidentiality’ it will no longer disseminate monthly data for the production, sales and exports of cement and clinker. The department of the Republic of Cyprus apologised to the users of the data stating that it is obliged, under the provisions of the Statistics Law of 2000, to respect the request.

The island’s main cement producer is Vassiliko Cement, which operates an integrated plant in the southern Republic of Cyprus. Italy’s Italacementi owned a minority stake in the company before its takeover by HeidelbergCement. LafargeHolcim’s subsidiary Boğaz Endüstri ve Madencilik runs a cement grinding plant in the so-called northern Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

Argentina: Data from the Asociacion de Fabricantes de Cemento Portland, the Argentine cement association, show that cement despatches rose sharply by 15.5% year-on-year to 1.03Mt in March 2017 from 0.89Mt in March 2016. Cement producers have described the result as the ‘best’ March in history, according to the Clarín newspaper. Despatches for the first quarter of the year rose by 5.8% to 2.71Mt from 2.56Mt. Consumption figures were similar. Cement producers have attributed the increase to higher demand for bulk cement caused mainly by government infrastructure spending. It is hoped that newly announced initiatives to boost house building will also boost the bagged cement market.

Belgium: European cement production grew by 0.9% year-on-year to 248Mt in 2015, according to newly published data in the 2015 Activity Report from the European Cement Association (CEMBUREAU).

Individual European countries recorded a mixed performance. Cement production in Spain grew by 3.3% in 2015. However, in Italy production fell by 3.4% and in France it fell by 5%. CEMBUREAU reported strong performance from its members in Eastern Europe, notably in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania. In the European Union (EU28) the association reported a 3.7% increase in cement production to 172Mt fro 165.8Mt. However, CEMBUREAU reinforced the face that EU28 cement production remains 37.7% below the production levels recorded in 2007.

CEMBUREAU data uses estimates for some countries where the data is unavailable including Germany, the UK and Poland. The association represents the national cement industry associations and cement companies of the European Union with the exception of Cyprus, Malta and Slovakia plus Norway, Switzerland and Turkey. Croatia and Serbia are associate members of the organisation.

Pakistan: The All Pakistan Cement Manufacturers Association (APCMA) has warned that an increase in Federal Excise Duty on cement may increase the levels of illegal imports of Iranian cement. The increase in the tax was announced in the 2016 – 2017 federal budget. Instead, the association wants the government to reduce taxes on cement to promote local dispatches, according to local media.

According to the latest data, issued by the APCMA, the cement industry dispatched 35.5Mt of cement between July 2015 and May 2016, an increase of 106% year-on-year from the previous period. However, exports to countries other than India, fell during this period.

Denmark/US: FLSmidth and GE (formerly General Electric) have announced a partnership to create digital solutions for increasing productivity in the cement and minerals industries. The new solutions developed on GE's cloud-based Predix platform will use FLSmidth's knowledge of cement and minerals processing along with GE's industrial application of networked physical objects (the internet of things) to increase the productivity of connected equipment units in the cement and mining industry.

FLSmidth will build their solutions on top of the Predix platform with applications for managing process flows. This should allow customers to leverage process data and analytics for monitoring, benchmarking their performance and predicting maintenance of their equipment.

"Cement and mining companies already collect significant volumes of data, but currently, only a fraction of it is used. This will be the first available solution for a full coherent process monitoring to leverage optimisation solutions offered by a full service provider like FLSmidth," said FLSmidth’s head of Global Research & Development Jens Almdal.