According to the article, massive new investment together with upgrading of existing cement plants are putting the cement industry in the danger of tens of millions of tons redundancy a year.
Latest statistics by the Building Material Department under the Ministry of Construction show that cement consumption approximated 45 million tons in the first half of 2018, up 30 percent over the same period last year and getting over 50 percent of the year plan.
However economic experts warned of a near future supply redundancy. The industry’s capacity nears 110 million tons a year if including the volume from plants expected to be built this year.
Aside from that, existing plants have kept improving technology so their production capacity might reach 120-130 million tons a year by 2020.
With the current development pace, 36-47 million tons of cement are forecast to be in excess by 2020, they said. Meantime forecasts in plans say that with the consumption capacity of 93 million tons by 2020, the redundant volume will be 25-36 million tons.
Despite that, a slew of new cement production lines have been increasing the industry’s supply capacity.
Specifically, three large projects with the total capacity of 10 million tons a year were put into operation last year. Lot of projects are expected to come into operation this year with capacity totaling over 12 million tons a year.
