Lafarge Zambia Plc will begin work on a 200 million-euro ($219 million) cement plant this year a Bloomberg reports. Dangote Cement has also set up Factory in Zambia and was set to commence operations last month. Dangote Cement’s plant cost t$400million and is primed to give Lafarge stiff completion in a market that had been dominated by Lafarge for years.
Lafarge Zambia already has been the dominant player in Zambia and is ramping up capacity with this new cement plant. Our checks also opine Lafarge Africa which is based in Nigeria does not have any direct relationship with Lafarge Zambia (which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lafarge Group in France)
See excerpts of Bloomberg article.
Construction on the expansion in Lusaka, the capital, will start in the second-half of the year and be complete in 2018, Emmanuel Rigaux, chief executive officer of the Lafarge SA unit, said in an April 1 interview. The work will double Lafarge’s plant in the city, adding 1 million metric tons of capacity.
Dangote Cement Plc was due to start production at its $400 million Zambia facility last month, challenging Lafarge’s dominance for the first time since it was founded in 1949 to supply cement for Kariba, at the time the world’s biggest dam. The Dangote plant will produce 1.5 million tons a year, more than Lafarge’s two existing factories combined. Even so, the expansions won’t cause a glut, mainly because of demand from the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, Rigaux said.
“The growth there is massive, in fact it’s even higher than in Zambia,” he said. The DRC “has one of the lowest cement consumption per capita and one of the highest growth rates in the world,” he said. “It’s a perfect combination.”Dangote plans to start work on a second plant, the same size as its existing facility in Ndola in Copperbelt province, the state-owned Zambia Daily Mail reported last month. A spokesman for Lagos-based Dangote, Africa’s largest producer of the building material by sales, didn’t respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
