Rwanda’s newest cement grinding plant is set to start commissioning at a great time. Last week Milbridge Group subsidiary Prime Cement said that its 0.6Mt/yr grinding plant in Musanze, Northern Province was preparing to start up in August 2020. This week the main local producer, Cimerwa, announced that it was setting standardised cement prices in an attempt to control speculation in the market following a shortage. According to local press, spikes in prices have been caused by an urgent supply tender from the Ministry of Education, which has started a large-scale project to build over 20,000 classrooms . Prime Cement is unlikely to make a difference to this particular shortage but its timing is spot on. Graph 1: Cement production capacity/population of East African countries. Source: Global Cement Magazine & Global Cement Directory 2020. Cement price surges in land-locked African countries crying out for construction materials are not new but it’s always illuminating to review how the situation is changing. Rwanda’s sole 0.6Mt/yr integrated plant is run by Cimerwa, a subsidiary of South Africa-based PPC, near Bugarama in the south-west of the country, close to the borders with Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Burundi. The new grinding plant is located in the north-west near the borders with DRC and Uganda. It will join another grinding plant run by Kenya’s ARM Cement at Kigali.
PPC’s operation in Rwanda has performed well in comparison to a poor market back home in South Africa. For its financial half year to September 2019 Cimerwa reported revenue growth of 28% year-on-year to US$31.2m due to a 20% increase in sales volumes. Earnings rose even more in percentage terms due to higher volumes and an improved cost per tonne performance, likely due to a debottlenecking project. More recently, PPC said that its operations in Rwanda were disrupted in April 2020 due to a coronavirus lockdown that started in late March 2020. It partially resumed operations in the second half of April 2020 with cement sales volumes for the month expected to be 15 – 20% of those in April 2019. The other point of note is that the Rwandan government was trying to sell its minority share in Cimerwa in mid-2019 but nothing has been publicly announced since then. However, Cimerwa was reported as being in the process of listing on the Rwanda Stock Exchange in May 2020.
Rwanda’s other grinding plant at Kigali has […]