Terry Mason, company manager at Readymix Gulf at Lafarge Emirates, said that it was important to be able to compete with regional competitors with appropriate products.

“You can’t just develop a product in Germany and then hope it will work in the GCC,” he said last week. “We have been thinking about setting up a lab in the Middle East specifically for products for the region. It would be a big commitment from Lafarge, though nothing has been finalised yet.”

Lafarge is one of the biggest concrete suppliers, and sold EUR 7.97bn in the first half of the year, up 3% against 2010, although overall profits were hampered by cost inflation and a decline in cement prices.

It has operations in the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Turkey through various joint ventures and acquisitions, employing more than 7,800 employees over seven production sites, six aggregate quarries and 62 ready mix plants.

It is now a year since it bought a facility in Saudi to add to its acquisition of Orascom Cement in Egypt in 2007.

Source: Construction Weekly.