Spain’s Cementos Portland Valderrivas Invests US$132m

Cementos Portland Valderrivas, S.A., the cement company pertaining to one of Spain’s leading construction and service groups Grupo FCC, has opened a new Giant Cement manufacturing plant in Harleyville (South Carolina) requiring an investment of US$132m (€108m). The company has invested a total of €650m in the United States in its operations since arriving in the American market.

The new factory of Giant Cement, which replaces the former one, incorporates the latest technological advances, meeting the most demanding environmental requirements. The Giant Cement factory is equipped with a dry production process furnace, instead of the four wet production process furnaces used up to now. The new premises will allow Cementos Portland Valderrivas to increase production capacity from 2000t to a total of 3000tpd and consume half the energy it used to.

Construction of the factory started in July 2003 and by mid-March production was already underway. A total of 25,000m3 of concrete, 7650t of steel and 360 electric engines have been used to build this new factory. The following new equipments have been installed:

   -- 240tph raw materials vertical mill
   -- six homogenization silos
   -- 3000tpd furnaces with pre-calcinator and cooler
   -- Quality control lab using an automated system enabling automatic
      sampling, transportation and analysis without manual intervention.
   -- High-performance filters for controlling emissions
   -- 7000t clinker silo
   -- 110tph horizontal cement mill
   -- Electric system with two high voltage transformers of 24 MVA each
   -- New control room with administration offices
   -- Centralised control system for equipments

The Giant Cement factory at Harleyville employs 170 people, including administration staff and sales representatives.

Grupo Cementos Portland Valderrivas has three factories in the United States, the third largest consumer of cement products worldwide. The factories are located at Harleyville, Bath (Pennsylvania), through Giant Cement Holding Inc., and Thomaston (Maine), which belongs to CDN-USA. In 2004, these three factories produced more than two million tons of cement, nearly 20 per cent of the total production registered by the group.

In Spain, the world’s largest market in terms of cement consumption per capita, the group controls six production centers, located in Andalusia, Castile-Leon, Madrid, Navarre, Cantabria and the Basque Country, responsible for a total production of 8.2Mta of cement.

The net turnover for Cementos Portland Valderrivas in 2004 was €881.5m, with a gross profit (EBITDA) of €265m and a net profit of €116.1m. Within the first four months of the year, turnover increased to €284m  (1.4 per cent more than the previous year during the same period) and the EBITDA to €54.5m, which implies a 14 per cent increase in comparison with the first four months of the previous financial period.