Cement consumption in Spain decreased by 19.2 per cent YoY to 842,861t in January 2021, according to the country’s cement association, Oficemen.

Demand was impacted by the stoppage of works due to snowstorm Filomena as well as subsequent clearing operations that lasted for a fortnight. In addition, January had two fewer working days than last year.

“The storm, although temporary, has been the last straw to a situation that, as we have been saying, is already critical for a sector, that of construction, which has been greatly affected by the economic crisis derived from the health pandemic that we have been experiencing for almost a year, and to which it arrived when it was still in the process of recovering from the previous crisis ,” explains the president of Oficemen, Víctor García Brosa.

“The Public Administrations must now prioritise, in the context of European funds, the implementation of mechanisms that allow a real structural transformation of our economic and industrial fabric in the long term. In this sense, and within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, at the sectoral level, the cement industry has presented, both alone and in collaboration with other industrial sectors, several innovative projects associated with the circular economy, sustainability in construction, use of hydrogen, digital transformation and decarbonization, designed to improve our competitiveness, as an industry and as a country, both inside and outside our borders,” Mr García Brosa added.

However, exports advanced 11.2 per cent YoY to 492,395t in January 2021 when compared with the export volumes of January 2020.