Global Cement News

Ireland: Rebecca McDonald has resigned from the board of CRH with immediate effect. The non-executive director for the building materials producer cited family commitments as her reason for resigning.

Kenya: ARM Cement has appointed John Ngumi, Pepe Meijer and Ketso Gordhan as non-executive directors of the company. They replace Atul Mathur, Michael Turner and Daniel Ndonye, who have resigned as directors following an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders held on 26 August 2016.

John Ngumi holds a BA degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford, UK. He started his banking career at National Westminster Bank, London and has since worked variously for Grindlays Bank, Barclays Bank, Citibank and CfC Stanbic Bank/Standard Bank of South Africa. In between he also co-founded one of Africa's first indigenous investment banking groups, Loita Capital Partners. Ngumi left CfC Stanbic Bank in 2015 upon his appointment by President Uhuru Kenyatta as non executive chair of the Board of Directors, Kenya Pipeline Company Limited.

Pepe Meijer is a Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC) Advisor and former Managing director for PPC International up-to November 2015. During his PPC tenure Meijer also held various Executive, General, Senior and Middle management positions across PPC’s cement operations that spanned over 28 years. Prior to joining PPC, he worked in the gold mining industry as section engineer and in the fishing/processing /frozen-food industry as group projects manager.

Ketso Gordhan joined CDC in April 2016 as the Head of Africa. He previously spent several years as Chief Executive Officer of PPC Cement, South Africa’s largest cement company. At PPC, Gordhan led the expansion of the company into sub-Saharan Africa, helping build the footprint outside South Africa into Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. Before PPC, Gordhan spent almost 10 years leading RMB’s private equity business. He has also held a number of public sector roles, including City Manager of Johannesburg and Director General of the Ministry of Transport, where he led major infrastructure projects, such as the South Africa’s N4 Toll Road.

UK: Hanson Cement’s bulk products division has promoted John Doolan to key account manager and Neil Jackson has been appointed as field sales manager. Doolan and Jackson will report to Mark Hickingbottom, the recently appointed national commercial director – bulk cement.

Doolan, who has worked for Hanson Cement for a number of years in different commercial roles, will work closely with Hanson’s key account customers to create and deliver strategic plans. He will also develop internal and external relations to carry out the company’s vision of outstanding customer service.

Jackson, previously Hanson’s area sales manager for the Midlands, will focus on sales strategy across the bulk division. He will manage a team of five district sales managers and ensure that customers’ needs are placed at the centre of the business.

China: JI Youhong has been appointed as the executive director, chief executive officer and a member of the executive committee of China Resources Cement with effect from 22 September 2016. He succeeds Pan Yonghong who has resigned from each of these roles.

Ji, aged 51 years, joined the group in October 2003 and has served various managerial positions of the company, including the general manager of various cement and concrete subsidiaries, the Marketing Controller from November 2008 to December 2012 and the Regional General Manager (Guangxi) from April 2012 to September 2016. He currently serves as the director of various subsidiaries of the company.

Ji is a senior engineer of building materials accredited by the Private Enterprise Senior Engineer Panel of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. He graduated from the Nanjing Industrial College (currently known as Southeast University), China with a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1985 and a master’s degree in inorganic and non-metallic materials in 1988. He has over 28 years of experience in construction materials engineering and marketing. He is currently the Chairman of the Guangxi Cement Association.

Congratulations are in order for CalPortland. It celebrates its 125th anniversary or quasquicentennial today. According to the company blurb on the website, a cement plant was established in 1891 in Colton, California. This was the first plant west of the Rockies and it went on to supply building materials towards the development of Los Angeles. However, the website doesn’t exactly shout about its purchase in 1990 by one of the Japanese companies that eventually became Taiheiyo Cement. Its earliest constituent company, the Cement Manufacturing Company, was established 10 years earlier than CalPortland in 1881. So perhaps CalPortland could celebrate the 135th anniversary of its Japanese owners at some point this year too.

Table 1: Age of leading cement companies by production capacity: Source: The Top 100 Report 2016, Global Cement Directory 2016, company websites, Wikipedia

As can be seen from Table 1, a list of major cement producers by production capacity in 2016, most of the European or non-Chinese multinationals are old. They have roots in various predecessor companies going back at least a century. By contrast most of the Chinese producers on this list are far younger having been established since the 1980s.

Table 2: Age of selected older cement companies still in business: Source: Company websites.

Table 2 adds an international perspective from the cement industry to CalPortland’s achievement. It’s an arbitrary list chosen from larger, mostly multinational cement producers that still operate today. As such it may well be missing some key names. However, they all follow the first industrial revolution innovators in cement such as John Smeaton, Joseph Aspdin or Louis Vicat. A generation later the first cement companies that have endured to the present in some form or another such as Lafarge, Vicat or Dyckerhoff started to appear. As impressive as the longevity of these companies are though, they pale in comparison to Saint-Gobain, the French construction materials company that was first established in 1665.

A BBC News article on company lifespans found that the average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P 500 index of leading US companies had decreased from 67 years in the 1920s to 15 years in 2012, according to research by Professor Richard Foster of Yale University [LINK]. By this measure most of the cement companies examined here are doing well. Yet, most of the older ones have endured such a tangle of mergers, acquisitions and changes that it is debatable whether any of them could be considered the same company as their originator. Joseph-Auguste Pavin de Lafarge may have started his operations at Teil in the Ardèche region of France in 1833 but LafargeHolcim, its modern day successor, is only one year old following its creation from Lafarge and Holcim in 2015.

This leads to the Ship of Theseus' paradox or the thought experiment regarding whether an object that has all of its parts replaced is still the same object. Just as humans gradually have most of their constituent parts (or cells) replaced over time so too do long-lasting companies. One superficial response is to point out that memory or heritage can have a lasting effect for individual, national and corporate entities. Just compare, for example, the different outlook of western European national states with millennia of continuation to much newer nations in the Americas. European countries, like the UK, are often seen as being old and stuffy compared to new world dynamism despite all the citizens in both regions being younger than their countries.

To end on a cementitious note, perhaps this dilemma should be renamed the Kiln of Theseus paradox for the cement industry. If a cement plant’s engineers replace all the parts of a cement kiln is it still the same kiln? The suspicion is that the staff at CalPortland would definitely think it is!

If any readers have a suggested name for a 135th anniversary This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.