Azernews.Az

By Aynur Jafarova

Uzbekistan will commission a cement plant worth $47 million in the Surkhandarya region by the end of the year.

According to the source in the Uzstroymateriali Joint Stock Company (JSC), the project customer is the foreign enterprise - Surkhancementinvest, a subsidiary of Russia's Oil and Gas Companies established in 2008 for the implementation of the cement plant construction project.

The plant's design capacity is 420,000 tons of cement per year. The cement will be produced by applying the technology of shaft furnaces which may significantly reduce the size of production space and heat expenditure.

In 2011, the company signed an investment agreement worth $46.7 million with Mack Management Service (registered in Sri Lanka) to build a plant. The construction began in September 2011. The project is financed through the direct investment of the Russian company.

Up to 60 percent of the products of the cement plant will be exported in particular, through increasing the volume of exports to Afghanistan.

Currently there are six cement plants with a total capacity of about seven million tons in Uzbekistan. The largest ones are Kyzylkumcement JSC (3.15 million tons), Akhangarancement JSC (1.74 million tons) and Kuvasaycement JSC (920,000 tons).

The share of the cement industry accounts for 72 percent of total commodity output in the construction industry in Uzbekistan as well as 75 percent of total exports of construction materials.

According to official statistics, production of cement in Uzbekistan in 2012 increased by 1.3 percent or by 100,000 tons to 6.78 million tons compared to 2011.

In general, the volume of cement production in Uzbekistan in the last ten years has doubled - from 3.2 million tons to 6.8 million tons.

The volume of cement production has increased by 33 percent since the beginning of the current year as well.

According to experts, the cement industry is one of the power-intensive sectors of the industry and the transportation and export of cement is economically unprofitable as well. Due to this, the local enterprises are focused on the domestic markets where the demand for cement has increased to 6 million tons.