ACC buys 40% stake in Alcon for Rs 22 crore

ACC, the country’s largest cement maker, has acquired 40 per cent stake in Goa-based Alcon Cement Company for Rs 22.25 crore. Alcon has a capacity of 500 tonnes a day.

The company, part of Swiss major Holcim, has bought out 0.4 million equity shares of Alcon representing 40 per cent of the equity size. For several years, the company had an arrangement with Alcon for trading cement.

Alcon has a clinker grinding and cement packing plant in Goa. It got into a joint venture with ACC for technical and marketing support.

“The stake was bought in the previous quarter. The company has been grinding clinkers for ACC and producing Portland Slag Cement (PSC) in Goa,” sources close to the development informed Business Standard.

They further added that ACC also has a partnership with Alcon for ready-mix concrete, in which the former markets the products from the latter’s two ready-mix plants.

The clinker to Alcon’s grinding unit is supplied from ACC’s Wadi plant, while slag is procured from Sesa Industries to make PSC. Last year, in a similar way, ACC had acquired around 14 per cent stake in Rourkela-based Shiva Cement (SCL). SCL also had alloted 22.7 million of warrants to ACC on preferential placement. ACC’s stake in SCL upon conversion of warrants into equal number of shares had gone up to 25 per cent.

As part of its strategy to divest from non-core activities, ACC divested its entire stake in its wholly owned subsidiary ACC Nihon Castings and ACC Machinery Company for Rs 75 crore. It also divested its stake in its associate company Almatis ACC.