The company has in the past months expanded its operations across Africa with the coming onstream of the 1.5million tonnes/year integrated cement plant in Mfila, Republic of Congo.
According to the unaudited results for the nine months ended 30 September 30 2017, the plant which began operations in September, has almost doubled the size of the cement sector in the country.
The Congo plant brings to ten the number of Dangote Cement plants across Africa.
Analysis of the results indicated that the company recorded strong volumes in Senegal, Ethiopia and Cameroon.
In the nine months under review, the 1.5million tonnes/year clinker grinding facility in Douala, Cameroon, sold approximately 938,000tonnes of cement, indicating an increase of 16.4% on the 806,000tonnes sold during the same period in 2016.
The company attributes the increase in sales to a number of factors ranging from strong brand recognition; increased point of sales branding; improvements in sales and marketing strategies, and higher visibility through trade shows.
Dangote Cement Ethiopia increased sales by 16.8% to nearly 1.7 million tonnes/year in the first nine months of 2017 representing capacity utilisation of approximately 88%. The cement plant in Pout, Senegal, sold 1 million tonnes/year of cement in the period under review, up by 21.7% on the comparable period of 2016. This represents almost 89% capacity utilisation at the factory.
“Our Pan-African operations are performing strongly with excellent sales growth in Cameroon, Ethiopia and Senegal. We are consolidating our success across Africa and have just commissioned our 1.5 million tonnes/year factory in Congo, the tenth country in which we have established operations,” says Onne van der Weijde, CEO, Dangote Cement.
“In our key operations in Nigeria we have significantly improved our fuel mix and this has helped increase margins across the group. It is especially good for Nigeria because most of the coal we are using is mined in our own country.”
The board of the cement company also announced changes in the leadership of the company with Onne Van der Weijde, stepping down as the company’s CEO at the end of 2017 having completed three years in this position, in order to return to his home country, The Netherlands. He will be appointed as a non-executive director of Dangote Cement, with effect from 1 January 2018.
The board expressed appreciation for his contribution during his period as CEO in the last three years, in which he managed an important growth phase in the company’s development.
Joseph Makoju, honorary adviser to the chairman and former managing director of WAPCO/Lafarge, will be acting MD/CEO of Dangote Cement.
