Nonetheless, the company is optimistic about the figures and Cemex executive vice president of planning and finance Fernando Gonzalez said, “During this quarter we continued to make significant progress in our objective of reducing our debt. To this end, we paid close to US$650million of our debt ahead of schedule.
“Also, despite the prevailing headwinds, we believe that economic conditions in most of our markets have stabilised or reached inflection points, as evidenced by positive cement sales volume performance in several of our markets. Our ongoing cost reduction and rightsizing efforts throughout our operations will allow us to take advantage of the economy as it recovers.”