France: Jacob Waerness, the former security chief at Lafarge Syria, has been arrested in Paris. He was taken into custody in early May 2018 while transferring between planes at the Charles de Gaulle airport, according to Le Monde newspaper. He was arrested on charges of financing terrorism. Waerness worked as the head of security for Lafarge in Syria from 2011 to 2013. He published a book about his experiences in 2016.

Vietnam: A joint venture between Vinaconex Engineering Construction and Investment and Lilama will supply equipment for the Tan Thang cement plant in Nghe An province. The contract is worth US$66m, according to the Viet Nam News newspaper. The new plant will have a cement production capacity of 2Mt/yr. Vinaconex and Lilama will join European companies Bedeschi and FLSmidth on the project.

Kyrgyzstan: Data from the National Statistics Committee data shows that local cement producers manufactured 1.5Mt of cement in 2017. Previously, the country produceds 1.3Mt in 2016 and 1.5Mt in 2015, according to the Central Asian News Service. The top three cement companies in terms of tax payments were South-Kyrgyz Cement, Kant Cement and the Southern Combine of Building Materials.

Angola: Fabrica de Cimento do Kwanza Sul (FCKS) has started selling its Yetu cement product in Luau, Moxico province. 400t of the product has been transported via the Benguela railway as part of a sales expansion drive, according to the Angola Press Agency. Huambo and Bié will be targeted next.

FCKS plant shut down in November 2017 and reopened in April 2018. The unit is planning to increase its production capacity to 10,000t/day from 5000t/day in the next stage of its improvement scheme.

Qatar: Alkhalij Cement, a subsidiary of Qatari Investors Group, has reached three years or 3.5 million hours without accidents, at its plant in Umm Bab. The company said that achievement showed that its employees had followed safety rules with dedication and reliability, according to the Qatar Tribune newspaper. Alkhalij Cement operates an integrated plant with a clinker production capacity of 6000t/day.

Switzerland/Uganda: LafargeHolcim has been criticised by two Swiss non-governmental groups (NGO) over alleged child labour issues in Uganda. The Protestant Church group Bread For All the Catholic Lenten Fund have accused the multinational of delaying compensation to alleged child labour victims, according to the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation. LafargeHolcim has denied the accusations. The NGOs have published video statements by children testifying that they previously worked for suppliers to Hima Cement, a local subsidiary of LafargeHolcim.

A report published in 2016 claimed that around 150 Ugandan children had worked for 10 years in quarries that supplied Hima Cement with pozzolana. Both Hima Cement and its parent company denied the claims. Later, Hima Cement subsequently announced that it would stop buying raw materials from small-scale miners and only source them from mechanised quarries that employ adults. At the same time LafargeHolcim commissioned an investigation that concluded that there was no evidence that children had worked for Hima Cement or for any of its other suppliers.

Croatia/Montenegro: Cemex Crotia says it is supplying cement for a local construction boom in Montenegro. It is supplying building materials for several infrastructure projects, including three mixed-use resorts and a motorway. It has already supplied over 0.28Mt of cement for the Smokovac-Mateševo section of the Bar-Boljare motorway. It has also supplied over 0.2Mt/yr of cement for resort projects at Portonovi, Porto Montenegro, and Luštica Bay on the Adriatic coast.

Along with most of the other multinational cement producers the weather and a shorter reporting period has given LafargeHolcim an easy target to blame its first quarter troubles on. Cement and overall sales both grew by over 3% year-on-year on a like-for-like basis but its earnings have fallen.

The problem appears to have arisen from falling earnings in Europe and its Middle East African regions. The decline in Europe was pinned on the weather, less working days and a disproportionate impact of maintenance shutdowns despite positive market trends in most countries. However, in Middle East Africa the finger was pointed squarely at ‘challenging’ conditions in key markets. If the trends from late 2017 continued then the hotspots causing LafargeHolcim trouble were likely to be Algeria, Egypt and Nigeria. That reliance on key markets is contrasted in Asia Pacific where markets in Indian and China have provided sufficient sales and profit growth to overcome problems in South East Asia. HeidelbergCement, its nearest multinational competitor with first quarter results out today, seemed to cope better with increased sales volumes of cement driven particularly by Indonesia and India.

Graphs 1: First quarter cement sales volumes and sales revenue for LafarageHolcim, 2015 – 2018. Source: Company reports. 

The graph above doesn’t seem to show the benefits the merger between Lafarge and Holcim promised back in 2015. Remember though that LafargeHolcim has been steadily reducing in size. Like-for-like sales generally show a much better situation.

In the latest results chief executive Jan Jenisch was keen to move on and focus on the group’s reorganisation plan, Strategy 2022. It has targeted net sales growth of 3 – 5% and recurring earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of at least 5%. Both look achievable based on previous quarterly and annual reports although the switch to recurring EBITDA from operating EBITDA makes it harder compare the first quarter of 2018 with the one in 2017.

The other notable change in recent months has been the decision by Thomas Schmidheiny to leave the board of LafargeHolcim. He has been named as the group’s honorary chairman and he will remain as a major shareholder of the group. During the negotiations to merge Lafarge and Holcim in 2015, Schmidheiny held out to get a better deal leading to Lafarge’s Bruno Lafont losing out on the chief executive role. Instead, that position went to Lafarge’s Eric Olsen who was succeeded by Jenisch in October 2017. Lafont and Olsen have since been enveloped by the French legal investigation into Lafarge Syria’s conduct during the Syrian Civil War.

How much of a difference Schmidheiny’s departure from the board of LafargeHolcim will make remains to be seen. However, the sense that Jan Jenisch is making changes to the group is palpable with changes made to its corporate structure in December 2017 followed by the introduction of the wider Strategy 2022 initiative. With the bad weather hopefully ended for the year all eyes will be on the half-year results.

China: Song Zhiping will step down as the director and the chairman of the board of directors of China National Building Material (CNBM). He will leave the posts at the company’s annual general meeting (AGM) in mid-June 2018. He will remain as chairman, and secretary of the Party Committee, of China National Building Material Group, the major shareholder of CNBM. Song Zhiping was appointed as chairman of the board of directors in 2005. Since then the company has become one of the largest building materials manufacturers in the world.

Other personnel changes include the departure of Guo Chaomin as director of the company and Xu Weibing will leave as supervisor and the chairman of the supervisory committee. Guo Chaomin has originally appointed as a non-executive director in 2011.

Proposed staff to be elected at the AGM include Peng Jianxin as executive director of the company, Xu Weibing, Shen Yungang and Fan Xiaoyan as non-executive directors and Li Xinhua and Guo Yanming as supervisors of the company.

Paraguay: Jorge Méndez has resigned as the president of Industria Nacional del Cemento (INC). He had been in post since 2013, according to La Nación newspaper.