Shares in Australia’s Rinker Group Ltd dipped on Friday after the building materials group said it would incur a non-cash pretax book loss of $15m on the sale of a US concrete business to a Canadian firm. Rinker, which makes about three-quarters of its earnings in the United States, said it had sold its small pre-stress concrete manufacturing business to concrete manufacturer Coreslab Structures of Canada for about $45m, below book value. Rinker said the US business, which was part of its US subsidiary Rinker Materials Corp., was a non-core operation that had been slated for divestment and had not been earning its cost of capital "for some time".
"The divestment of this small, underperforming operation is in line with our strategy to focus on the performance and growth of our integrated heavy building materials operations, and will have a positive impact on Rinker Materials’ results going forward," Chief Executive David Clarke said in a statement.
