US: Eagle Materials has appointed Mike Nicolais as the chairman and Michael Haack as the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of its Heavy Materials spin-off business. The building materials company intends to split into separate Heavy Materials and Light Materials businesses in the summer of 2020. The Heavy Materials company will focus on cement production with complementary concrete, aggregates and sand operations. It will also continue to evaluate strategic alternatives with respect to its frac sand business.

Zimbabwe: Lafarge Zimbabwe’s chief executive officer (CEO) Siame Kaulule has left the company for a new role with LafargeHolcim in South Africa, according to the NewsDay newspaper. Kaulule was appointed as the head of LafargeHolcim’s Zimbabwe operations in early 2019. He succeeded Amal Naiel, who spent five years in the post.

UK: Hanson Cement has appointed Andy Murphy as national commercial director. He reports directly to chief executive officer (CEO) Simon Willis and assumes commercial responsibility for the cement division as well as Hanson’s major projects and commercial excellence teams. Murphy holds experience in sales and marketing roles in the construction sector, including at Lafarge Tarmac, Jewson and building materials supplier SIG Distribution.

US: Continental Cement Company has appointed Mike Gordon as Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing. He previously worked as Vice President, Sales and Marketing at the building materials producer since 2015. Prior to this Gordon worked in a variety of roles for Lafarge North America since 1991.

Thailand: SCG’s cement business has delivered sales and earnings growth in 2019 despite problems with the company’s chemicals business. It attributed its cement sales performance to growing distribution and retail businesses. Its cement business sales revenue grew by 1% year-on-year to US$5.93bn and its earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) grew by 3% to US$674m. SCG has also announced the creation of a retail joint-venture in Cambodia to sell building materials. Overall, the group’s sales declined by 8% to US$14bn in 2019.

India: HeidelbergCement India’s revenue grew by 4% year-on-year to US$221m in the nine months to 31 December 2019 from US$232m in the same period in 2018. Its sales volumes fell by 1.9% to 1.22Mt from 1.29Mt. Its net profit rose by 26% to US$22.4m from US$28.3m. The subsidiary of Germany’s HeidelbergCement said that, despite a fall in revenue in the quarter to 31 December 2019, a decrease in petcoke prices and an increase in power generation from waste heat recovery systems, had helped to keep costs under control.

The cement producer added that de-bottlenecking work at its grinding mills at Imlai in Madhya Pradesh and Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh is expected to be completed by the end of March 2020. Following completion of the project the company’s total cement grinding capacity will be 6.26Mt/yr.

Bolivia: Antonio Pino, Vice Minister of Hydrocarbons, says that a new gas pipeline will have to be built to supply the Potosí cement plant at Chiutara. This may delay the start of the new plant to as late as early 2022, according to the El Potosí newspaper. The 1.3Mt/yr integrated unit was previously planned to start operation in February 2020.

The project was supported by the country’s previous government administration through the creation of Empresa Publica Productiva Cementos de Bolivia (ECEBOL. The plant is being built by Sociedad Accidental Imasa Polysius, a joint venture created by Polysius and Imasa.

US: Cemex says that a class action lawsuit filed with the Southern District Court of New York in 2018 has been dismissed. The legal action was made by a group of investors who allege that they were misled in relation to an alleged corruption case in Colombia. The building materials company said that the decision of the court was final and that the plaintiffs would not be entitled to a new trial,

The legal proceedings followed reports in 2018 that the US Department of Justice had requested information from Cemex about a case of alleged corruption in the construction of the Maceo cement plant in Colombia. In 2016 Cemex fired several senior staff members in relation to the Maceo project and its subsidiary’s chief executive resigned. This followed an internal audit and investigation into payments worth around US$20m made to a non-governmental third party in connection with the acquisition of the land, mining rights and benefits of the tax free zone for the project.

Cape Verde: Turkey’s OYAK is planning to invest in pozzolan extraction following a meeting between OYAK's Cement Concrete Paper Group chairman Suat Çalbiyik and prime minister Ulisses Correia e Silva. Mining activity has remained muted since Cabocem, an Italian company, closed in 2013, according to Sapo. OYAK has operations in the country via Portugal’s Cimpor, which it acquired in 2019.

US: Turkey’s Çimsa has launched a new white cement product for the US market at the World of Concrete trade fair in Las Vegas. The subsidiary of Sabancı Holding has showcased its Çimsa Aluminates and Çimsa Super White product ranges.

“As one of the largest grey cement producers of Turkey, Çimsa is among the top three in the global league of white cement. We have increased our visibility in the global cement industry through our investments abroad,” said, Çimsa’s chief executive officer (CEO) Ülkü Özcan. He added that the cement producer founded its Cimsa Americas Cement Manufacturing and Sales Corp in the US in 2017. It then started operations at a grinding mill in Houston, Texas in 2019.