Chad: Idriss Déby, the president of Chad, says that Société Nationale de Ciment du Tchad’s (SONACIM) grinding plant at Baore will reopen in the next month. The government has paid the company a subsidy of US$9m to restart operations, according to the Alwihda newspaper. The price of cement will also be capped locally. The president previously asked SONCAIM to restart production at the unit in July 2020 following reports of cement shortages and price rises.

Turkey: ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions Turkey has launched a new 14,000m² manufacturing and service centre including four workshop halls and offices in Ankara. The company said that the site will employ 30 people to begin with and produce and assemble steel structures, machines, components and spare and ware parts, including for the cement industry.

Managing director Can Yapan said, “This new manufacturing and service centre enables us to even better meet our customers’ increasing demand for services throughout the entire life cycle of their plants and machines.” He added, “We already started contributing Turkey’s economy with the completion and export of our first manufacturing order in October 2020.”

Plant manager Serhan Usman said, “We want to offer the best possible services to our customers. Our maintenance assistance system and performance and quality monitoring make it easier to plan and forecast plant operation. Drone inspections and 3D plant scanning, or remote inspections and remote condition monitoring are just a few more solutions of our digital service portfolio.”

Uzbekistan: Cement companies produced 7.8Mt of cement in the first nine months of 2020, a rise of 2.6% year-on-year from the same period in 2019. The Trend News Agency reports that the country exported US$24.2m-worth of cement in the period, to Afghanistan, Singapore, Russia, China and Turkey. The value of its cement imports – from Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Iran and Russia – exceeded this by more than double at US$870m.

Vietnam: Long Son Cement says that it has nearly completed the installation of a new kiln line at its Long Son cement plant. When commissioned in December 2020, the latest expansion will increase the plant’s capacity by 2.5Mt/yr to 7.0Mt/yr. The Việt Nam News newspaper has reported the cost of the upgrade as US$172m.

The new line is Vietnam’s 86th and brings the country’s integrated capacity to 106Mt/yr, against a domestic demand of 70Mt/yr.