Cementos San Juan inaugurates plant, Chile

Cementos San Juan inaugurates plant, Chile
14 September 2009


Chilean cement firm Cementos San Juan, controlled by Spanish group Cementos La Unión, has started production at its new plant in region V, local press reported.

Following an investment of US$40mn, the company expects to increase production from 300,000tpa to 800,000tpa within 16 months.

"We are going to start the project to expand the plant to 800,000tpa.We will start with buying the mill, then comes the engineering stage and then construction. We will take 16 months to start operations," the firm’s general manager Juan José Córdova was quoted as saying by paper Estrategia.

The expansion plan will cost approximately US$10mn.

Cementos San Juan expects to recover the investment in nine years and aims to capture 8% of the local market in the next two years.

"We are entering the market with state-of-the-art technology and we are using a sack differentiation strategy, which has an easy-open system as well as a plastic film to make the product waterproof," Córdova said.

The Chilean cement market is almost equally divided between Cementos Bío Bío, Polpaico and the former Lafarge Chile which was recently bought by Peruvian Brescia group for US$555mn.
Published under Cement News