Brazil: France’s Vicat has confirmed that it is in talks with Ciplan. Local newspaper Valor Econômico revealed that Vicat was in the ‘final stages’ of buying the cement producer. Ciplan was founded in 1968 and it operates an integrated plant at Sobradinho in Bahia near to Brasilia.

South Africa: A ship carrying clinker and gypsum has arrived at the Port of Ngqura. The raw material is intended for Osho Cement, a company setting up a grinding plant at Coega special economic zone, according to the Herald newspaper. The imported clinker and gypsum was transported by truck to the new plant.

The joint venture between South Africa’s Osho ventures and Germany’s Heidelberg Cement plans to market cement from its new unit to South Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and islands in the Indian Ocean. The plant is scheduled to open the new plant in late 2018.

Eritrea/Ethiopia: High volumes of cement imports have been reported across the Ethiopian-Eritrean border following a normalisation of relations between the neighbouring countries. Since mid-September 2018 an estimated 50t/day of cement have been transported from Adigrat in Ethiopia to three border towns in Eritrea, according to business owners in Adigrat quoted by the Addis Fortune newspaper. “A minimum of 20 trucks carrying cement is leaving from Adigrat to Eritrea daily,” said Angesom Berhane, owner of a cement store in Adigrat.

India: N Srinivasan, the vice-chairman and managing director of India Cements, predicts that cement demand is improving in the south of the country. At the company’s annual general meeting in Chennai he said that demand for cement is expected to improve the 70% capacity utilisation rate recorded in the 2017 – 2018 financial year, according to the Financial Express newspaper. The region had a cement production capacity of 160Mt/yr but demand was only up to 80Mt.

He added that India Cements reported a utilisation rate of 71% in the previous financial year and that this had improved to 80% in the first quarter of the current year. He also expected that the second quarter would be better despite floods in Kerala and a transporters' strike.