Global Cement News

Indonesia: A Chinese company, in cooperation with PT Banggai Citra Lestari, has announced that it will build a cement factory in the district of Banggai, Central Sulawesi. It will be the first cement factory in the Province.

"We already carried out a survey for a location in the sub-district of Balantak and we already have the mining license," said Budi Kurniadi, CEO of PT Banggai Citra Lestari at a meeting with Central Sulawesi Governor Longki Djanggola. He was speaking alongside the project manager Wang Yong.

Kurniadi announced that his company and the unnamed Chinese partner would build a factory with a production capacity of 9.0Mt/yr of cement. Governor Longki Djanggola said he appreciated the plan and pledged to facilitate implementation of the project.

India: Rain Industries has approved an upgrade project on a cement mill at Rain Cement’s Boincheruvupalli Village plant in Andhra Pradesh. The project is approved up to a cost of US$5.9m, funded through internal accruals. It is expected to be completed by 30 June 2019. After the upgrade the plant’s grinding capacity will increase from 2.0Mt/yr to 2.8Mt/yr.

Pakistan: Kohat Cement Company Ltd. has ordered four vertical roller mills (VRM) from Germany’s Loesche in order to expand its cement plant in Kohat, 160km west of Pakistan’s capital Islamabad.

The order comprises a 4-roller raw material mill with a material throughput of 500t/hr and two cement mills each with a grinding capacity of 210t/hr of Portland cement. The order is finally complemented by another vertical roller mill for grinding 50t/hr of anthracite. They will all be used on the same cement production line, which Kohat Cement is in the process of building. The lead time for the mills will be eight months.

The plant’s production capacity is currently around 2.8Mt/yr of Portland and white cement. When the new line enters production, the plant’s capacity will rise by 2.2Mt/yr to reach 5.0Mt/yr.

Brazil: SNIC, Brazil's national cement industry union, has announced that sales of cement in Brazil came to 4.6Mt in July 2018. The figure is down by 2.5% in comparison to July 2017. In the comparison for working days, the drop reached 4.6% in July 2018 in the year-on-year comparison, and 9.5% in comparison with June 2018. In the first seven months of 2018 domestic cement sales totalled 30.4Mt, a fall of 1.7%. SNIC forecasts a drop of 1-2% for 2018 compared to 2017.

Colombia: DANE, Colombia's national department for statistics, has announced that sales of grey cement stood at 0.94Mt between January and June 2018, which represented an increase of 3.6% compared to the same period of 2017. A DANE report indicated a gradual recovery of the sector after a sales drop of 10% registered in March 2018. However, the Colombian Association of Concrete Producers (Asocreto) has predicted that consumption would close the year with similar results to those posted in 2017, when sales were lower than in 2015 and 2016.