CW Research releases update for its world cement consumption forecast report

CW Research's just released 2H2013 Global Cement Volume Forecast Report (GCVFR) released in early September indicates that cement markets around the world seem to be stabilizing, even as much Europe is further downgraded and some emerging markets disappoint.

The twice yearly report projects a slight uptick in world cement demand, driven by an upgrade of Chinese demand, but much of Europe, North Africa, Middle East and parts of Latin America see heavy downgrades in the short-term and medium-term.

CW Research's forecast for the current year was revised to 3.92 billion tons, up 4.9 percent compared to last year. However, in the mid-2013 update, world cement ex-China consumption growth rate advanced at its slowest pace since the crisis in 2008 ÔÇô 2009, rising only 2.7 percent to 1.6 billion tons.

ÔÇ£Even though we have a bottom-up approach where we model each country individually, we can see in the aggregate, as the global economy remains mired in a morass of headwinds, optimism having waned in many markets at a dramatic pace. Geopolitical issues aside, weaker global resource trade keeps pressuring emerging markets, fuelling inflation in some cases, lack of public spending in others. The drag is taking its toll on construction and we are materially less optimistic about 2013 and 2014 than we were six months ago,ÔÇØ Robert Madeira, CW Group Managing Director and Head of Research exclusively commented for ICCM.