Global Cement News

Saudi Arabia: Tabuk Cement has appointed Saeed Bin Saeed Obaid as its new chairman. He succeeds Khalid Bin Saleh Al-Shathry.

Pakistan: Syed Jamal Shahid has retired as a director of Fauji Cement with effect from 19 January 2017. Tahir Ashraf Khan has been appointed as a director of the company with effect from 20 January 2017.

Germany: Heribert Breuer has retired as the managing director of Allmineral. Breuer was one of the founders of the company in 1988 and he worked for it since then helping to integrate the company into Hazemag. He will be succeeded by Marco Steinberg.

Steinberg previously worked as the Vice President Global Sales & Marketing for MBE Coal & Minerals Technology, which was previously known as KHD Humboldt Wedag Coal & Minerals. His focus in the new position will be to expand the product portfolio of the subsidiary and build on technological advances.

Allmineral manufactures customised processing plants for the raw materials industry. More than 750 installations designed in Duisburg for dry and wet processing of primary and secondary raw materials are currently operating reliably and efficiently around the world.

Austria: Peter Oswald has been appointed as the next chief executive officer (CEO) of Mondi Group. The current CEO, David Hathorn, will retire from the role on 11 May 2017 following the group’s annual general meeting whereupon Oswald will succeed him. Subsequently Hathorn will continue to work for Mondi in an executive capacity until his retirement in February 2018.

Oswald graduated in law from the University of Vienna and in business administration from WU-Vienna Business School. He began his career with Deutsche Bank and automotive company KTM. He joined the Frantschach Group in 1992 as the head of internal audit, later becoming corporate controller. After serving as chief executive of its bag and flexibles business from 1995 to 2001, he was appointed chief executive of Mondi Packaging Europe in 2002, leading its subsequent integration with Frantschach into the new Mondi packaging division. Oswald was appointed chief executive officer of the Europe & International Division in January 2008. He is also currently serving as chairman of the Confederation of European Paper Industries.

“One of the worst moments in its history.” That’s how Paulo Camillo Penna, the newly appointed president of SNIC - the Brazilian National Union of Cement Industry - described his industry last week. Few people are likely to be envying his position at the moment. As Camillo Penna went on to explain, domestic sales of cement fell by 11.7% year-on-year to 57.2Mt in 2016. He added that following capacity utilisation rates of 70% in 2015 and 57% in 2016 that he expected the rate to fall below 50% in 2017. When he said it was bad he wasn’t kidding.

Graph 1: Brazilian cement sales from 2011 to 2016. Source: SNIC.

Graph 2: Regional Brazilian cement production from 2014 to 2016. Source: SNIC.

Graph 1 illustrates how stark the decline in cement sales has been since the growth period at the start of the 2010s. Sales have fallen by 15Mt since 2014 in a country that has a production capacity of 88Mt/yr. Graph 2 presents a regional picture of sales. Note in this graph the sharp drops in sales (21%) in the southeast region of Brazil, an area that contains the key cement producing states of Minas Gerais and Rio De Janeiro. The decline in the northeast region including the state of Bahia, another key cement producing state, has been less extreme but it is still over 15%.

Votorantim, the country’s largest cement producer by production capacity, reported that its cement sale volumes fell by 6% to 26Mt in the first nine months of 2016, with declines in Brazil offset by business in other countries like the US. Its sales revenue also fell, by 7% to US$3.03bn. InterCement’s cement and clinker sales volumes fell by 16% to 11.8Mt in the first half of 2016 and its sales fell by 31% to Euro898m. As it described it, ‘the political and economic instability in Brazil in the first half, impacting on unemployment, investment and government spending, ultimately retracted the construction activity, compressing cement consumption.’ To compound these problems newly opened production capacity also ‘intensified’ competition. Later in 2016 InterCement’s parent company Camargo Corrêa was reported to be in talks to sell a minority stake in Argentina’s Loma Negra to pay off its debts from the cement business in Brazil. Finally, from an international perspective, LafargeHolcim’s global results for the first nine months of 2016 were negatively impacted by ‘challenging’ conditions in Brazil amongst other countries. It laid out an environment of reduced sales volumes and falling prices, although it said that it had used cost cutting to fight this.

Politically, the fallout from the Petrobras bribery scandal is continuing to shake out in the construction industry. In October 2016 it was revealed that the Brazilian Development Bank BNDES had frozen loan payments to construction firms involved in overseas projects worth up to US$7bn, including Camargo Corrêa. The Brazilian economy is expected to grow modestly, at a rise of 0.5% gross domestic product (GDP) in 2017 after dropping in 2016 although this forecast was falling towards the end of 2016. More hopeful news came from the São Paulo state construction union, SindusCon-SP, that in December 2016 released a report forecasting that the construction industry’s output could rise by 0.5%. However, this was dependent on economic reforms.

The question for Camillo Penna and the rest of the Brazilian cement industry is: where exactly is the bottom of the curve? SNIC forecast that cement sales will contract by a further 5 – 7% in 2017 and this is below the 11.7% drop experienced in 2016. So, does SNIC think that the industry is starting to hit against a bedrock of demand that economic headwinds can’t shift? In this kind of environment it seems likely to expect increased merger and acquisition activity. The merger of Brazil’s Magnesita and Austria’s RHI refractory companies that was announced in the autumn of 2016 may just be the start.