Cement Wars
A Few Days in India
I just got back from India. It’s not the first time I’ve visited, but on this occasion I got to venture beyond the conference rooms of Mumbai and Gurgaon. Two weeks on a tour of Rajasthan took me and my family inside palaces, forts, temples, wildlife sanctuaries and local villages; we explored the old city of Jaipur, the lakes of Udaipur and, of course, the Taj Mahal. (Top tip: Arrive an hour before dawn and wait at the gates. When the site opens, don’t stop to take pictures – you can do that later – rather, walk briskly past the reflecting pool straight to the tomb; if you time it right, you will be first in, giving you around ten minutes of solitude before others arrive.)
Gazing out of the car windows between destinations, I caught sight of cows blocking roads, tuk-tuks laden with cargo and what looked to the untrained eye like multiple traffic near-misses. But more surprising was the amount of cement advertising that adorned our route. Billboards promoting brands like Platinum, Shree, Ambuja, Birla, Wonder, and JK Lakshmi dominated roadside walls. While ads for Coca-Cola are as ubiquitous as they are elsewhere, cement seems to command a share of available advertising space totally out of proportion with consumers’ propensity to buy.
A few inquiries revealed the story. India is the world’s second largest producer of cement after China. In 2023, the country produced 410 million tonnes of the stuff, which compares with 91 million in the US. Extensive investment in housing and infrastructure fuels demand, which has grown by 8-9% in each of the past two years. To cater to the burgeoning demand, capacity is being added at a rate of up to 50 million tonnes a year. One plant I spotted from the top of the historic Chittorgarh Fort has capacity to produce around 4 million tonnes (the people who built the fort 1,200 years ago must have wished they had the benefit of such convenience).
Yet with utilization running at around 65%, the industry lacks pricing power and producers have begun to consolidate. In the past 12 months, market leader UltraTech paid $697 million for a 56% stake in India Cements as well as $641 million to buy the cement business of Kesoram Industries; last month it announced an equity investment in Star Cement. The company’s goal is to increase capacity from 150 million tonnes to over 200 million tonnes in three years. Its chief competitor, Adani, only entered the industry in 2022 after acquiring Swiss multinational Holcim’s local cement business for $10.5 billion. It has since bought several other companies with a goal of expanding capacity to 140 million tonnes by 2028, up from 80 million last year.
Even without the benefit of M&A, the big players are getting bigger – the top four have increased their share of organic capacity from 48% in 2020 to 51% in 2024. I guess I’m not the target market, but advertising must help. In the year to March 2023, the industry upped its marketing spend by 14%. In addition to using roadside ads, cement companies promote their products via a range of channels. Adani’s Ambuja brand launched an online campaign last year that had 30 million views on digital platforms.
Together with announced deals, the share of the big four is forecast to grow to 63% of capacity by 2026. At that level of consolidation, they may be ready to dial down marketing spend. I suspect that if I were to return to India in a few years time, cement hoardings will be giving way to adverts for less consolidated industries.
One candidate might be banks.