Concrete plans for China
22 Nov 2004
Despite last month's news about the acquisition of RMC, one of the UK's leading cement manufacturers, by CEMEX, the global cement industry is facing unprecedented demand for its ubiquitous product.
Unfortunately, at least for European producers like RMC, the bulk of that demand is coming from the burgeoning economies of the East. The beneficiaries of the building booms of India and China, for example, are more likely to be Pacific-based producers, such as New Zealand's Golden Bay Cement.
With its huge infrastructure projects like the recently completed Three Gorges dam and hydroelectric power plant, China is rapidly becoming the rest of the world's major export market. The sheer scale of investment in and by the world's fastest growing economy can seem overwhelming at times.
A statistic quoted by so many that it must be true, is that at one time in the 1990s a quarter of the world's high-rise cranes were at work in Shanghai alone. And today, it's estimated that China consumes 40% of the world's output of concrete and a staggering 90% of its steel.
To put such statistics into a specific context, consider the global power and automation group ABB. According to Dinesh Paliwal, who heads up ABB's Automation Technologies division, China is now the third largest market for the group. It employs some 7000 of its 95,000 employees worldwide in the country and has been involved in many of its major industrial developments, including the Three Gorges power project.
Sceptics may question the sustainability of such rapid growth, but ABB is certainly not among them. Apart from opting to hold its recent annual group board meeting in Beijing, the company is demonstrating its confidence in the nation's future by opening a new R&D centre in Beijing next February and collaborating with Tsing Hua University on basic research projects.
