Heidelberg Materials is a German multinationalbuilding materials company headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany. Formerly known as HeidelbergCement AG, the company has rebranded as Heidelberg Materials in September 2022.[5] It is a DAX corporation and stands as one of the world's largest building materials companies. On 1 July 2016, HeidelbergCement AG completed the acquisition of a 45% shareholding in Italcementi. This acquisition made HeidelbergCement the number one producer of construction aggregates, the second-largest in cement and the third-largest in ready-mixed concrete worldwide. In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, HeidelbergCement was ranked as the 678th -largest public company in the world.[6]
The enlarged group has activities in around 60 countries with 57,000 employees working at 3,000 production sites. HeidelbergCement operates 139 cement plants with an annual cement capacity of 176 million tonnes, more than 1,500 ready-mixed concrete production sites, and over 600 aggregates quarries.[7]
History
HeidelbergCement incl. Italcementi
The company was founded on 5 June 1874 by Johann Philipp Schifferdecker, at Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It was making 80,000 tonnes per annum of Portland cement in 1896. It acquired numerous other small companies from 1914 onwards, and by 1936, it was making one million tonnes per annum.
Following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the cement industry profited massively from state-run construction and armaments projects, leading to a generally positive view of the policies of the Reich government among workers and management of the company.[8] The company's general director Otto Heuer had joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933, and was a member of the Freundeskreis Reichsführer SS.[9] During the Second World War, the cement industry was classified as essential to the war effort and initially experienced only minor restrictions in production. As the war progressed, prisoners of war and forced labourers were used in numerous plants; according to the company, the number of people affected is estimated at 1,000.[10]
Activities abroad began with the acquisition of part of Vicat Cement, France. Shipments reached 8.3 million tonnes in 1972. In 1977, a massive program of purchases in North America began with the acquisition of Lehigh Cement. In 1990, expansion in eastern Europe began.
In 1993, it acquired part of SA Cimenteries CBR of Belgium, which already had a major multinational operation. Since then, it has continued to expand, with complete buy out of CBR, and purchases in eastern Europe and Asia. A major step was the acquisition of Scancem in 1999, with operations in Northern Europe as well as Africa. Indocement in Indonesia was included in 2001.
In May 2007, the British company Hanson was acquired, a transaction worth £7.85 billion (US$15.8 billion), which gave the company a stronger market position in the United Kingdom and the United States, and turned HeidelbergCement into the world's leading producer of aggregates.
HeidelbergCement has (2010) 29 cement and grinding plants in Western and Northern Europe, 19 in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 16 cement plants in North America, and 14 in Africa and the Mediterranean Basin. The company sold Maxit Group and its 35% share in Vicat Cement to help finance its acquisition of Hanson plc in August 2007. In most of the group's European countries, HeidelbergCement is the market leader in the cement business.
Adolf Merckle was a big investor in HeidelbergCement.[2] A capital increase in HeidelbergCement in September 2009, combined with a selling of shares from the Merckle family, opened up for other international owners and higher trading volumes on the stock exchanges.[citation needed] In August 2006, HeidelbergCement AG entered the Indian cement market with the acquisition of Mysore Cement.[11]
Kunda Nordic Tsement in Estonia is one of the subsidiaries of HeidelbergCement.
On 1 July 2016, HeidelbergCement AG completed the acquisition of a 45% shareholding in Italcementi S.p.A.[13][14] With the acquisition, HeidelbergCement becomes the number 1 producer of aggregates, the number 2 in cement and number 3 in ready mixed concrete worldwide. The company agreed to sell its assets in the United States for $660 million to Cementos Argos to fulfil anti trust requirements for the takeover.[15]
In California, after 80 years of operations and more than 2,000 violations over a 10-year period the Heidelberg owned Leigh Cement factory and quarry announced in 2023 that it would shutdown.[17] According to the same news article, the environmental advocacy non-profit Green Foothills claimed that the cement plant was the worst source of air pollution in the county of Santa Clara.
In March 2024, residents of Glyncoch, near Pontypridd in South Wales, started a series of protests around the over-riding of the local authority's opposition to extend quarrying, by the Minister of Climate Change, Julie James. This successful appeal will allow a further 15.7 million tonnes of rock to be extracted for road surfacing and runways. The quarry operations will continue until 2047 and will come within 164 meters of schools and housing as well as destroying a community green space and a wildlife sanctuary.[18]
The appeal report claimed that "The dust assessments concluded that the potential impacts associated with both the continuation of existing activities and the proposed extension would be slight adverse at most." and that "From all that I have seen and read there are no objections or concerns relating to landscape, visual impact, ecology, hydrology, cultural heritage, agricultural land quality impacts"[19]
The Heidelberg headquarters on Berliner Strasse, built in 1963, were demolished in 2017 and a larger new building was built on the same site by 2020 for around 100 million euros.[20]
HeidelbergCement has entered new important markets, such as France and Italy in Europe, Egypt and Morocco in North Africa and Thailand in Southeast Asia. In the Canada, India and Kazakhstan, the takeover will further strengthen the existing market presence of HeidelbergCement.[7] The enlarged group has activities in around sixty countries, with 60,000 employees working at 3,000 production sites. HeidelbergCement operates 139 cement plants with an annual cement capacity of 176 million tonnes, more than 1,500 ready mixed concrete production sites, and over 600 aggregates quarries.[7]
The company worldwide
Heidelberg Materials Global Corporate Headquarters are located in Heidelberg, Germany.
The company operates in over 50 countries/territories around the world including:
As cement manufacturing is an extremely CO₂ intensive process, the cement industry is one of the main contributors to climate change, being responsible for 8 percent of global emissions.[24] Therefore, from all companies traded on the DAX, HeidelbergCement is the second largest CO₂-emitter.[25] For this reason, there have already been numerous protests by environmental groups, like Fridays For Future,[26]Extinction Rebellion[27] and Greenpeace.[28] In August 2020, the local group "Wurzeln im Beton" ("Roots in Concrete") blocked the main entrance to the company's headquarters[29] and in May 2021, its cement plant near Heidelberg was blocked by the local Extinction Rebellion chapter.[30]
HeidelbergCement has been heavily involved in the planned construction of a controversial cement plant on the Indonesian island of Java through its subsidiary "Indocement". The objective is the exploitation of the Kendeng mountains against the resistance of the people living there.
In addition to the destruction of the complex ecological system, the construction also has created the marginalization of partially indigenous living inhabitants of the region to follow.[33] In this region, the indigenous known as Sedulur Kendeng are protesting against the planned mining operation of PT Semen Indonesia, a state owned enterprise. In March 2017, 50 protestors poured concrete over their feet in front of the Presidential Palace in Jakarta. This is the second time this has occurred in eleven months.[34]
In addition to the protest against the factory building and its ecological consequences as "misconceived `development` at the expense of indigenous and peasants", the activists also appealed politically at HeidelbergCement that a multinational "company should not invest in environmental destruction and human rights violations, in any country in the world."[35]
In September 2020, representatives of the local communities submitted a complaint to the German government.[36] It alleges HeidelbergCement's plans in the Kendeng mountains to threaten their livelihoods, water resources and the local ecosystem as well as sites sacred to local Indigenous Samin communities. As a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Germany maintains a National Contact Point that addresses complaints against German companies for overseas violations of the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises.[37] The guidelines contain standards on human rights and the environment.[38]
West Bank
In Israeli occupied West Bank HeidelbergCement's wholly owned subsidiary Hanson Israel manufactures ready-made cement, aggregates and asphalt for Israel's construction industry. In March 2009, the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din filed a petition with the Israeli high court demanding a halt to mining activity in West Bank quarries, including Hanson Israel's Nahal Raba quarry.[39][40]
According to research of the ARD magazine "Panorama" on 2 September 2010, and the ARD Studios Tel Aviv, the minerals produced are brought to Israel without any benefit to the Palestinian communities.[41] Palestinians from the village of az-Zawiya in the immediate vicinity of the quarry lay claim to the land. The Israeli Supreme Court rejected the petition from Yesh Din in December 2011.
The largest Danish pension fund, PFA Pension(Da), has divested its interest from HeidelbergCement, due to "Violation of basic human rights, which conflicts with UN Global Compact principles 1 and 2."[42]
A cement is a binder, a chemical substance used for construction that sets, hardens, and adheres to other materials to bind them together. Cement is seldom used on its own, but rather to bind sand and gravel (aggregate) together. Cement mixed with fine aggregate produces mortar for masonry, or with sand and gravel, produces concrete. Concrete is the most widely used material in existence and is behind only water as the planet's most-consumed resource.
CRH plc is an international group of diversified building materials businesses whose headquarters is in Dublin, Ireland. It manufactures and supplies a wide range of products for the construction industry. The group was formed through a 1970 merger of two leading Irish public companies, Cement Limited and Roadstone Limited (1949). CRH's primary listing is on the New York Stock Exchange since 2023, prior to which it was on the London Stock Exchange and on Euronext Dublin.
CEMEX S.A.B. de C.V., known as Cemex, is a Mexican multinational building materials company headquartered in San Pedro, near Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico. It manufactures and distributes cement, ready-mix concrete and aggregates in more than 50 countries. In 2020 it was ranked as the 5th largest cement company in the world, at 87.09 million tonnes.
Adolf Merckle was a German entrepreneur and billionaire. He died by suicide at age 74 due to losses during the financial crisis of 2007–2008. He was at one point the fifth-richest person in Germany with a net worth of $9.2 billion.
Ready-mix concrete (RMC) is concrete that is manufactured in a batch plant, according to each specific job requirement, then delivered to the job site "ready to use".
Heidelberg Materials UK is a British-based building materials company, headquartered in Maidenhead. Previously known as Hanson UK, the company has been a subsidiary of the German company HeidelbergCement since August 2007, and was formerly listed on the London Stock Exchange and a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
Italcementi is an Italian multinational company, quoted on the Borsa Italiana, which produces cement, ready-mix concrete and construction aggregates. In 2015, 45% of Italcementi was acquired by HeidelbergCement, together forming the world's second largest cement producer.
Construction aggregate, or simply aggregate, is a broad category of coarse- to medium-grained particulate material used in construction, including sand, gravel, crushed stone, slag, recycled concrete and geosynthetic aggregates. Aggregates are the most mined materials in the world. Aggregates are a component of composite materials such as concrete and asphalt; the aggregate serves as reinforcement to add strength to the overall composite material. Due to the relatively high hydraulic conductivity value as compared to most soils, aggregates are widely used in drainage applications such as foundation and French drains, septic drain fields, retaining wall drains, and roadside edge drains. Aggregates are also used as base material under foundations, roads, and railroads. In other words, aggregates are used as a stable foundation or road/rail base with predictable, uniform properties, or as a low-cost extender that binds with more expensive cement or asphalt to form concrete. Although most kinds of aggregate require a form of binding agent, there are types of self-binding aggregate which require no form of binding agent.
Vicat SA is a French company manufacturing cement, aggregates and ready-mix concrete in four continents.
Buzzi Unicem S.p.A. is an Italian company, quoted on the Borsa Italiana, which produces cement, ready-mix concrete, and construction aggregates. Its headquarters are in the town of Casale Monferrato which was once known as the Italian ‘cement capital’. Today it has subsidiaries, interests and operations in Italy, Luxembourg, Germany, Algeria and Eastern Europe as well as in North America.
Hanson Australia is a premixed concrete, aggregates and precast company. Founded in 1949 as Pioneer Concrete and later re-branded to Pioneer International, it was taken over by Hanson in 1999.
The EUROCEMENT group is the biggest supplier of cement, ready-mix concrete and aggregates in Russia. It has 16 cement plants across Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan as well as several concrete mix plants, concrete goods factories and aggregate-mining quarries. The Group's annual production capacity is 40 MT of cement and 10 Mcm of concrete. Aggregate resources: carbonate rock explored reserves amount to 2.8 billion tonnes; granite-explored reserves amount to 1.8 billion tonnes.
Ketton Cement Works is a large cement plant and quarry based in the village of Ketton in the county of Rutland in the United Kingdom. Now owned by HeidelbergCement, the plant produces around one tenth of the UK's Portland Cement needs. Ketton works employs around 220 people and is at the forefront of sustainable cement production, namely through the increasing use of non-fossil fuels for the kilns.
Hope Construction Materials was a producer of cement, concrete and aggregates in the United Kingdom, founded on 7 January 2013 by entrepreneur Amit Bhatia. Before 1 April 2014, Hope Construction Materials was the trading name for the two entities, Hope Cement Limited and Hope Ready Mix Concrete Limited. It was acquired by Breedon Aggregates in August 2016. Assets included Hope Cement Works, the largest cement plant in the United Kingdom at Hope, Derbyshire, and a network of 170 ready-mix concrete plants, as well as aggregate extraction and logistics operations.
Lafarge is a French industrial company specialising in cement, construction aggregates, and concrete. It is the world's largest cement manufacturer. It was founded in 1833 by Joseph-Auguste Pavin de Lafarge and is a part of the Holcim Group.
The Holcim Group, legally known as Holcim Limited, is a Swiss multinational company that manufactures building materials. It has a presence in around 60 countries, and employs around 60,000 employees. Holcim operates four businesses segments: cement, aggregates, ready-mix concrete, and other products, including precast concrete, asphalt, mortar, and other building materials.
Breedon Group plc is a British construction materials company which has its headquarters at Breedon on the Hill, Leicestershire, England. The current chairman is Amit Bhatia, son-in-law of Lakshmi Mittal, the billionaire steel magnate who became a Breedon shareholder following the acquisition of Hope Construction Materials. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
Hope Cement Works, is a cement plant located near to the village of Hope in Derbyshire, England. The plant is mostly self-contained with its own shale and limestone quarries adjacent, with only fuel and small amounts of additives needing to be brought in. The site is located inside the Peak District National Park, and so is subject to tighter planning restrictions than other cement plants in the United Kingdom. It is now the largest cement plant in the United Kingdom, and is also one of the largest emitters of CO2 within the national park.
The Antoing cement kiln is located in the Belgian province of Hainaut. The facility is located next to the Scheldt River in the Tournai region. It was built in 1929 under CBR which was later taken over by Heidelberg Materials.
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€21.095 billion (2022)
€2.476 billion
