Cement: Supply Rises While Price Stagnates

Cement companies in Cameroon have all announced the ambition to extend their factories and step up annual production to about seven million tonnes by 2018 but price remains disturbingly high.

It is barely one and half years when the Prime Minister, Head of Government, Philemon Yang cut the symbolic ribbon in Douala declaring Ciments de l'Afrique Cameroun (CIMAF) officially operational in Cameroon. The Moroccan-based company which is effectively present in five different countries in Africa: Ivory Coast, Guinea Conakry, Burkina Faso, Gabon and Congo Brazzaville and which had been supplying cement in Cameroon was injecting 500,000 metric tonnes of the product into the market while announcing its ambitions to step up production to about one million metric tonnes in the near future. That future appears to be now. According to a press statement the company issued recently, it has decided to triple its production capacity by extending its factory to increase supply to 1.5 million metric tonnes by 2018. If one were to go by the figures provided by the various cement companies operating in the country, then the 500,000 metric tonnes brought to 3.6 million tonnes the quantity of cement put into the Cameroonian market annually.
Cimenterie du Cameroun (Cimencam), on its part, last March 16, launched the construction of a new production factory in Nomayos in Mbankomo Sub Division of the Centre Region, bringing to three the number of factories belonging to the company. CIMENCAM says it is investing FCFA 28 billion into the project for an annual production capacity of 500,000 metric tonnes. Dangote Cement; Africa’s leading cement producer that went operational in Cameroon in March 2015 precisely in Douala, is equally planning to open another factory in Yaounde in a bit to double production. Its present annual production stands at 1.5 million tonnes.
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