Cement Industry to Invest 540 Billion Won in Environmental and Other Facility Upgrades This Year

Modification and expansion of production facilities at Ssangyong C&E Donghae Plant.
[Photo provided by Korea Cement Association]

[Asia Economy Reporter Kwak Min-jae] The domestic cement industry’s planned facility investment for this year is estimated to reach approximately 540 billion KRW.

The Korea Cement Association announced on the 8th that its survey on this year’s facility investment plans showed an investment scale of 538.6 billion KRW. This figure is more than double that of 2019 (242.9 billion KRW) and also exceeds the average investment amount over the past five years (368 billion KRW).

The cement industry analyzes that the investment amount has increased rapidly as the investment trend based on carbon neutrality for greenhouse gas reduction and circular economy realization such as waste plastic processing, which started with leading companies like Ssangyong and Hanil, has spread throughout the entire industry.

Looking at the breakdown by category, due to the characteristics of the equipment industry (facility maintenance and repair), investments in recently strengthened environmental regulations (pollution, environment & safety) and cost reduction (automation, energy saving) sectors (rationalization facility investment) amount to about 330 billion KRW, accounting for about 90% of the total investment.

A Korea Cement Association official said, “Despite the deterioration of business performance in the first half of the year due to sluggish domestic shipments and sales losses from the Cargo Solidarity strike, environmental investment cannot be postponed, so an increase in external financing in the future is inevitable.”