2020 has been a year like no other and this clearly shows in the financial results of the major cement producers so far.
- The first jolt is that several major Chinese cement producers have seen their sales fall. Following a tough first quarter due to coronavirus, the Chinese cement industry then overcame floods in the summer, to eventually report a decrease in cement output of 1.1% year-on-year to 1.68Bnt in the first nine months of 2020. The world’s largest cement producer, CNBM, reported a slightly smaller drop in sales year-on-year in the first nine months of 2020. This relatively small fall, just below 1%, may be due to CNBM’s size and diversity of business interests. Other large Chinese producers have noted bigger losses, such as Huaxin Cement’s 9% sales decline to US$3.04bn and Jidong Cement’s 5% sales fall to US$3.8bn. However, Anhui Conch actually saw a 12% rise in sales to US$18.7bn.
- HeidelbergCement announced its January-September 2020 revenue decreased by 7.9 percent to EUR13,140m in comparison with the previous year’s EUR14,273m. Excluding consolidation and exchange rate effects, the decline amounted to 6.9 per cent. Changes to the scope of consolidation of EUR4m and exchange rate effects of EUR159m had a negative impact on revenue.
Group-wide cement and clinker sales volumes fell by 4.7 per cent to 90.1Mt (previous year: 94.5Mt) in the first nine months. Excluding consolidation effects, the decline amounted to four per cent. On a like-for-like basis, deliveries in the Africa-eastern Mediterranean Basin Group area recorded a solid increase. In northern and eastern Europe-central Asia, sales volumes remained at the previous year’s level. Volumes declined in the other group areas.
- Nigeria’s government has allowed Dangote Cement to resume exports across the country’s land borders, reports Bloomberg. The step has raised expectations that the country may be opening up trade with its neighbors again.
Land borders have been closed for over one year as authorities curbed smuggling and wanted to boost local production. While it encouraged the consumption of locally-grown produce such as rice, factories across west Africa have been impacted by the closure.
- Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies has announced that it has obtained Fiches de Déclaration Environmentale et Sanitaire (FDES) environmental and health declaration forms for concrete floors and shells manufactured using its H-UKR cement.
These two FDES are part of a continuous proactive approach to certify innovative new Hoffmann Green cements. These standardized documents present the results of the Life Cycle Analysis of concrete manufactured from Hoffmann Green H-UKR cement for floor and shell elements as well as health information enabling the environmental and health performance to be calculated for a building’s eco-design. The FDES will be published in the INIES database, national reference database on environmental and health characteristics for the construction sector.
The FDES provides those who use concrete manufactured from Hoffmann Green cement with a summary of multicriteria, objective quantitative and qualitative information for every phase of a product’s life cycle (production, transport, implementation, use and end of life). It represents a tool for evaluating the environmental performance of buildings constructed using Hoffmann Green concrete, particularly within the framework of the new RE2020 environmental regulation whose implementation has, for now, been postponed until next summer.
