Cosmos completes 2013 Brazil shipment quota

The year’s last shipment of clinker produced at the Toral de los Vados plant of Cementos Cosmos will be heading for parent company Votorantim’s cement works in Brazil. Around 2000tpd has been trucked from the plant to the port of Langosteira, La Coruña since the end of September and loaded onto ships. As a result, some 44,500t of clinker will be heading to the Latin American country over the next few days.

The shipment, the last of six undertaken this year, enables Cementos Cosmos to sell around a third of its production and maintain both production and staffing levels at the cement works. In addition, the 10,000 truck journeys needed to move the clinker from plant to port have generated further employment in times of austerity.

According to the cement plant’s director, Luis Arroyo, " We have exported a total of 265,000t of clinker to Brazil and hope that next year we can reinitiate this sales campaign in the South American country to alleviate some of the negative developments in the domestic market. "??Toral de los Vados has a capacity of 1.5Mta of cement but due to the crisis in the construction sector , is operating at 30 per cent capacity. Oficemen, Spain’s cement association, expects to close 2013 with a national cement consumption below 11Mt – a level not seen since the mid-1960s.