Major equipment at Sephaku Holdings’ Aganang integrated plant is performing above guaranteed levels, with performance tests at the plant having been successfully concluded in July.
The company on Wednesday also reported that its Sephaku Cement (SepCem) operations had been operating uninterrupted at steady-state capacity since May.
“SepCem has continued to enhance its share of the market, as confirmed by the Dangote Cement results, in which the associate’s revenue for the six-month period ended June was just above R1-billion,” it said in a statement.
This performance could be compared to the R919-million reported for the 12 months to December 2014.
The lower-than-targeted interim margin was mainly owed to the six-and-a-half-week kiln downtime, two weeks of which was planned maintenance. The buffer clinker stock was depleted by the end of the fourth week and resulted in the loss of about 37% of the average sales volume in April, but, by May, the volumes had returned to normal levels.
The sales performance, to date, reflected a positive trend towards SepCem achieving its targeted revenues for the second half of the year in spite of the highly competitive landscape.
Sephaku expected industry demand growth for the remainder of the year to be 3.5% to 13.8-million tonnes against a production capacity of 16-million tonnes based on clinker output. This projected demand did not include potential volumes from Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland.
Wholly owned subsidiary MeĢtier Mixed Concrete also continued to perform well, supplying concrete to four anchor contracts attained in April.
The scale of the contracts ranged from 50 000 m3 to 75 000 m3.