An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

Lo­cal ce­ment man­u­fac­tur­er Trinidad Ce­ment Ltd (TCL) yes­ter­day an­nounced that the price of the com­mod­i­ty will in­crease on Feb­ru­ary 19, 13 days from to­day.

The ce­ment price in­creas­es are be­tween 6.63 per cent and 7.69 per cent, ac­cord­ing to Guardian Me­dia cal­cu­la­tions.

The new price of the 42.5 kilo­gram (kg) bag of Pre­mi­um Plus ce­ment VAT in­clu­sive is $57.38. The cur­rent ce­ment price is $53.81, which is an in­crease of 6.63 per cent.

Eco Ce­ment in 42.5kg sacks will now be $52.88 VAT in­clu­sive, while the cur­rent price stood at $49.10. That is an in­crease of 7.69 per cent

Sul­phate Re­sis­tant in 42.5kg sacks will now in­crease to $148.50 VAT in­clu­sive from $139.08, an in­crease of 6.77 per cent.

The no­tice of the in­crease, which takes ef­fect on Feb­ru­ary 19, was sent to hard­ware stores and large cus­tomers yes­ter­day af­ter­noon.

In the mes­sage to its “val­ued clients,” TCL said: “As dis­cussed at our vir­tu­al meet­ing held on Mon­day Jan­u­ary 22, 2024, Ce­mex TCL con­tin­ues to face in­creas­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing costs. De­spite our in­vest­ments and ef­fi­cien­cies im­ple­men­ta­tion, we have been un­able to mit­i­gate in­creas­es ful­ly.

“Ce­mex TCL con­tin­ues to give pri­or­i­ty to our val­ued cus­tomers by pro­vid­ing ex­cel­lent qual­i­ty ce­ment and avail­abil­i­ty at the most com­pet­i­tive prices. Please be guid­ed by the at­tached up­dat­ed cus­tomer price list, ef­fec­tive Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 19. We re­main com­mit­ted to mak­ing in­vest­ments in cre­at­ing a su­pe­ri­or cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence for you."

In a state­ment to the Guardian Me­dia, last evening TCL said due to the con­tin­u­ous in­fla­tion that af­fects the in­dus­try and oth­er eco­nom­ic sec­tors, it has be­come nec­es­sary to ad­just the price of ce­ment by $3 per sack.

“This de­ci­sion is un­avoid­able to cope with the es­ca­lat­ing costs of nat­ur­al gas, raw ma­te­ri­als, spare parts, and oth­er es­sen­tial in­puts, which have risen sig­nif­i­cant­ly in the past year. We have con­tin­ued to in­vest in en­hanc­ing our ef­fi­cien­cies, up­grad­ing our tech­nol­o­gy, and op­ti­miz­ing our process­es to min­i­mize the en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact of our op­er­a­tions.

“How­ev­er, these ac­tions are in­suf­fi­cient to mit­i­gate the neg­a­tive ef­fect of in­fla­tion on our busi­ness. De­spite this price ad­just­ment, Trinidad & To­ba­go still re­tains the most com­pet­i­tive price of ce­ment in the Cari­com re­gion,” TCL fur­ther stat­ed.

The ce­ment com­pa­ny said it con­tin­ues to gen­er­ate for­eign ex­change through its ex­ports, pro­vid­ing di­rect and in­di­rect em­ploy­ment, and work­ing to­wards pre­serv­ing the en­vi­ron­ment.

TCL in­creased prices on March 20, 2023, five per cent for ECO ce­ment and eight per cent for pre­mi­um plus.

The com­pa­ny said then, “Ce­ment prices are in fact set to be mar­gin­al­ly ad­just­ed, tak­ing in­to con­sid­er­a­tion some of the ris­ing cost fac­tors with which TCL is faced.”

In De­cem­ber 2021, TCL raised the price of a 42.5kg bag of ECO ce­ment by eight per cent to $43.71 VAT-in­clu­sive, and by 15 per cent to $46.56 VAT-in­clu­sive for a pre­mi­um of the same weight.

One hard­ware own­er, who wished not to be named, said TCL con­tin­ues to raise prices, be­cause it is the mo­nop­oly sup­pli­er of ce­ment, so the hard­ware has no choice but to go with the in­creas­es, which is not good.

Mex­i­co’s Ce­mex group is TCL's largest share­hold­er with a 69.83 per cent stake in the ce­ment pro­duc­er,

Rock Hard Dis­trib­u­tors, a com­pa­ny owned by the Ramhit con­struc­tion fam­i­ly, de­cid­ed to shut down its op­er­a­tions in Sep­tem­ber 2021.

Rock Hard had been im­port­ing ce­ment from Turkey. In its no­tice in Sep­tem­ber, Rock Hard com­plained that it faced “con­tin­u­ous chal­lenges” from the T&T Gov­ern­ment “ini­tial­ly in the form of mis­clas­si­fi­ca­tion, which meant we were charged a high­er rate of du­ty than was legal­ly al­lowed for our ce­ment."

The Gov­ern­ment al­so im­posed a 50 per cent du­ty on im­port­ed ce­ment.