The US is continuing to ramp up cement import capacity even as a demand slowdown has emerged, with policy uncertainty, especially around tariffs, creating considerable risk.
"Any forecast has risk," analyst Ed Sullivan of The Sullivan Report said at last week's Intercem Americas conference in Miami, Florida. "This forecast has more risk than I can recall."
An especially uncertain policy landscape is not only making the forecast shakier than usual but also increasing hesitancy among consumers and businesses.
"The risks are not balanced. They are more on the downside, at least in the near term," Sullivan said.
Ozinga, a concrete and cement supplier in Florida and the US midcontinent, was initially optimistic that cement demand would come "roaring back" after the November 2024 presidential election. "Then the Liberation Day thing happened, and I think that really put a pause to a lot of projects, just enough to make it very disappointing for most of the year," chief executive officer Marty Ozinga said, referring to the slate of tariffs President Donald Trump rolled out in early April.
Although there has been a "measured turnaround in the last eight weeks", likely in part because "the dust is settling a bit" on US tariff announcements, "we're not going to catch all the way up by any means", Ozinga said.
Tariffs have added $5-10/t of costs for US importers, On Field Investment Research managing partner Yassine Touahri said.
Sullivan expects that US cement consumption fell by 5.2pc year over year in 2024 and will drop by another 4.6pc this year. His outlook for next year calls for a further 0.2pc drop, but this would be from a lower base of comparison, with 2026 likely to be the bottom at around 100mn t.
But in terms of the longer-term outlook, the US is still well below its previous per capita cement consumption rates, with a forecast population growth of 30mn people by 2050, Sullivan said. At the rate of consumption of just a few years ago, the US would easily reach 140mn t market volume, he said.
"It is glaring that we're nowhere near" the 30-year average in terms of cement consumption per capita, Ozinga said. "Ever since the great financial crisis, we've missed residential, and that used to be the bread and butter of everything we did."
As mortgage rates remain relatively high at above 6pc and home affordability is at record lows, the residential construction sector is likely to continue to struggle. And quarterly reports from major cement players are showing a flat or even negative outlook for cement prices, making investments into the sector "pretty risky", Sullivan said.
Domestic capacity utilization is only running around 76pc, which is well below the 80pc that producers would like to see, he said.
Import capacity continues to rise
"On the import side, capacity additions are not slowing down at all", even though demand for additional imports is much less certain than it was 3-5 years ago, LEK Consulting managing director Olivier Asset said.
The amount of new and announced import terminal capacity is "not at all dissimilar to what we saw in the previous cycle in the 2000s", prior to the global financial crisis, Ozinga said.
As the US domestic industry has lost market share to imports, cement companies have focused on vertical integration to control the market, Touahri said. Managing Director of FMI Capital Advisors George Reddin agreed. For those companies especially in areas near import facilities and with multiple cement plants, such as Louisiana, there is a drive to vertically integrate by acquiring ready mix concrete, Reddin said. This is part of a cycle that "happens every 15 years or so", he said.
"Where the imports are is where the activity is in mergers and acquisitions," Reddin said. "Nobody wants to see their production go down, certainly no one wants to see an idle plant."
Sullivan forecasts import volumes to also hit a bottom at around 17mn t in 2026, despite the large amount of new import capacity coming on line.
