Cement Is The New Oil As Africa’s Richest Man Takes On Lafarge

Zambia Potential

“We’ve been growing with Zambia,” he said. “We were the first really big construction company to go ahead with a very large investment. We were the first to see the potential that Zambia had.”

Lafarge Zambia is doubling capacity at its Lusaka plant in a 200 million-euro project as it seeks to capitalize on growing demand in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the north. Increased competition and lower prices won’t change its plans, he said.

Lafarge, which last month completed a merger with Switzerland’s Holcim Ltd. to form the world’s biggest cement maker, said in February last year it planned to increase Africa capacity to more than 30 million tons by 2017 from 20 million tons. The combined company had about 50 million tons of capacity on continental Africa at the end of last year.

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