Economy & Market

Changing hues of brands

Published

7 years ago

January 1, 2019

admin

Though brand pundits are brushing aside cement terming it as a ‘commodity’, Indian cement companies are focusing on brand building for hogging the consumer’s mind space, even among bulk users.

At the inception of brand creation, it is done mostly in the name of the corporate. But as the business matures, the brand gets a distinct name and identity. A brand represents the entire organisation’s commitment, and efforts to get the all-important competitive advantage. It is a promise that the entire organisation has to fulfil in all its functions.

Take the example of one of the young brands in the industry – Bharathi Cement. Launched in 2009 with the tagline "Three Times Better", it sought to highlight the superiority of its product on three counts – Quality, Consistency and Technology. For ensuring superiority in all these areas they had to survey the standards followed by various manufacturers for ensuring the ultimate product quality available in the market and quality of inputs that could ensure that their product could stand one step above others on these three parameters. As if to highlight its technical superiority it has also introduced SAP-software based e-billing system across the supply chain.

"Consistency plays a very important role in cement. It was ensured that each and every bag was of consistent quality since inception. We were the pioneer in certain aspects of the cement industry. To maintain the consistency of cement, we introduced robotic quality control, which checks quality at all the three stages,"said Suresh Kumar, Assistant Vice President – Marketing, Bharathi Cement.

Not strength alone
On the other hand, JK Grey Cement brand is 40-years old. It had to keep repositioning itself from time to time along with the changing consumer trends and preferences. Instead of just jostling for space highlight the strength of its products, JK Cement focused on ‘Trust’, leveraging on its legacy and strong heritage it has built over the years.

Though mass media campaigns are one of the main focus areas of many cement companies, JK Cement has adopted humour to take its message across. "In the Cement industry, most brands hung on to the claim of ‘strength’ which was visually represented through ‘obvious’ treatment routes. We took the route of humour and also got a celebrity cricketer, Virender Sehwag to endorse the brand promise of trust,"says Raghavpat Singhania – Special Executive, JK Cement.

More recently, based on an extensive brand study and research that gave us a very important insight on the basic human need for safety, JK Cement repositioned itself with a brand mantra "Build Safe."

Thus, brand-driven companies are strongly consumer-knowledge and understanding driven. Who will the brand serve most, what will the brand promise be, how will it back that promise up in each and every act, where will it spend most of its R&D efforts – these are some of the tough questions brand-building corporate will have to answer. The marketing team will work as an interface with the customers to understand the needs of the customer.

JK Cement has adopted national wall painting competitions for its wall putty branding, where ‘prevention of flaking/ pappdi’ had been the core single-minded message. This campaign saw the birth of a brand evangelist – Chhutkau Painter, the national wall painting champion who touts victory over substitute products like POP and inexpensive chalk mitti by using JK Wall Putty. "The campaign was then extended to a prosperous Chhutkauji, with his own wall painting academy training a new breed of wall painting experts. With the third campaign, Chhutkauji grew in both fame and recognition, and is invited to judge the World Wall Painting Championship. Over the years, the Chhutkau series has very successfully strengthened our positioning statement for JK Wall Putty – ‘Deewarein Bol Uthengi’,"says Singhania.

Premium brands
Lot of cement companies have launched premium brands under their umbrella to tap premium clientele imparting better pricing power for the companies. To sustain its brand, Bharathi has also launched new products aligning to its brand identity. "We had added value in product with Bharathi Ultrafast in the blended cement category. That will also help keep the brand fresh in the minds of people, sustaining the brand,"says Kumar of Bharathi.

Technically, blended cements are far superior because of low heat of hydration. We can produce a dense concrete by using blended cements. It gives you the strength of OPC, and durability of blended cement, with a fast setting ability.

JK Cement has recently added a premium grey cement product to our portfolio – JK Super Strong, that has been specially designed for concrete applications and caters to Karnataka, Maharashtra, Goa and Kerala. "After extensive R & D, it has been manufactured with MPET – a new breakthrough technology in cement production that improves the performance of cement,"says Singhania.

Focus to remain
Though cement is considered to be a commodity for there is no much differentiation that is possible, if the cement company wants to cater to the rural markets that account for over one-third of the overall market might have to promote their brands which impart some trust and brings in loyalty for the branded products.

Bulk cement is picking up pace, lowering the share of bag cement in urban areas and in infrastructure projects. Due to economies of scale in usage and transportation that the bulk cement brings in, many big projects are opting for it.

"Unless we show value in the products or services, it will be continued to be looked upon as a commodity, and it will not enjoy any premium or preference. In fact, purchase itself is a premium. From this perspective also, it is even more important that the brand equity is sustained,"says Kumar.

"Considering that at present, the rural markets in India are still in the developing phase, cement has no direct substitute and the small quantity of cement used in building a home doesn’t require bulkers. This would act as a major factor for the cement brands to survive even 20 years from now,"says Singhania.

– B.S. SRINIVASALU REDDY

Economy & Market

TSR Will Define Which Cement Companies Win India’s Net-Zero Race

Published

6 days ago

April 27, 2026

admin

Jignesh Kundaria, Director and CEO, Fornnax Technology

India is simultaneously grappling with two crises: a mounting waste emergency and an urgent need to decarbonise its most carbon-intensive industries. The cement sector, the second-largest in the world and the backbone of the nation’s infrastructure ambitions, sits at the centre of both. It consumes enormous quantities of fossil fuel, and it has the technical capacity to consume something else entirely: the waste our cities cannot get rid of.

According to CPCB and NITI Aayog projections, India generates approximately 62.4 million tonnes of municipal solid waste annually, with that figure expected to reach 165 million tonnes by 2030. Much of this waste is energy-rich and non-recyclable. At the same time, cement kilns operate at material temperatures of approximately 1,450 degrees Celsius, with gas temperatures reaching 2,000 degrees. This high-temperature environment is ideal for co-processing, ensuring the complete thermal destruction of organic compounds without generating toxic residues. The physics are in our favour. The infrastructure is not.

Pre-processing is not the support act for co-processing. It is the main event. Get the particle size wrong, get the moisture wrong, get the calorific value wrong and your kiln thermal stability will suffer the consequences.

The Regulatory Push Is Real

The Solid Waste Management (SWM) Rules 2026 mandate that cement plants progressively replace solid fossil fuels with Refuse-Derived Fuel (RDF), starting at a 5 per cent baseline and scaling to 15 per cent within six years. NITI Aayog’s 2026 Roadmap for Cement Sector Decarbonisation targets 20 to 25 per cent Thermal Substitution Rate (TSR) by 2030. Beyond compliance, every tonne of coal replaced by RDF generates measurable carbon reductions which is monetisable under India’s emerging Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS). TSR is no longer a sustainability metric. It is a financial lever.

Yet our own field assessments across multiple Indian cement plants reveal a sobering reality: the primary barrier to scaling AFR adoption is not waste availability. It is the fragmented and under-engineered pre-processing ecosystem that sits between the waste and the kiln.

Why Indian Waste Is a Different Engineering Problem

Indian municipal solid waste is not the material that imported shredding equipment was designed for. Our waste streams frequently exceed 40 per cent to 50 per cent moisture content, particularly during monsoon cycles, saturated with abrasive inerts including sand, glass, and stone. Plants relying on imported OEM equipment face months of downtime awaiting proprietary spare parts. Machines built for segregated, low-moisture waste fail quickly and disrupt the entire pre-processing operation in Indian conditions.

The two most common failures we observe are what I call the biting teeth problem and the chewing teeth problem. Plants relying solely on a primary shredder reduce bulk waste to large fractions, but the output remains too coarse for stable kiln combustion. Others attempt to use a secondary shredder as a standalone unit without a primary stage to pre-size the feed, leading to catastrophic mechanical failure. When both stages are present but mismatched in throughput capacity, the system becomes a bottleneck. Achieving the 40 to 70 tonnes per hour required for meaningful coal displacement demands a precisely coordinated two-stage process.

Engineering a Made-in-India Answer

At Fornnax, our response to these challenges is grounded in one principle: Indian waste demands Indian engineering. Our systems are built around feedstock homogeneity, the holy grail of kiln stability. Consistent particle size and predictable calorific value are the foundation of stable kiln combustion. Without them, no TSR target is achievable at scale.

Our SR-MAX2500 Dual Shaft Primary Shredder (Hydraulic Drive) processes raw, baled, or loosely mixed MSW, C&I waste, bulky waste, and plastics, reducing them to approximately 150 mm fractions at throughputs of up to 40 tonnes per hour. The R-MAX 3300 Single Shaft Secondary Shredder (Hydraulic Drive), introduced in 2025, takes that primary output and produces RDF fractions in the 30 to 80 mm range at up to 30 tonnes per hour, specifically optimised for consistent kiln feeding. We have also introduced electric drive configurations under the SR-100 HD series, with capacities between 5 and 40 tonnes per hour, already operational at a leading Indian waste-processing facility.

Looking ahead, Fornnax is expanding its portfolio with the upcoming SR-MAX3600 Hydraulic Drive primary shredder at up to 70 tonnes per hour and the R-MAX2100 Hydraulic drive secondary shredder at up to 20 tonnes per hour, designed specifically for the large-scale throughput that higher TSR ambitions require.

The Investment Case Is Now

The 2070 Net-Zero target is not a distant goal for India’s cement sector. It starts today, with decisions being made on the plant floor.

The SWM Rules 2026 are already in effect, requiring cement plants to replace coal with RDF. Carbon credit markets are opening up, and coal prices are not going to get cheaper. Every tonne of coal a cement plant replaces with waste-derived fuel saves money on one side and generates carbon credit revenue on the other. Pre-processing infrastructure is no longer just a compliance requirement. It is a business investment with a measurable return.

The good news is that nothing is missing. The technology works. The waste is available in every Indian city. The government has provided the policy direction. The only thing standing between where the industry is today and where it needs to be is the commitment to build the right infrastructure.

The cement companies that move now will not just meet the regulations. They will be ahead of every competitor that waits.

About The Author

Jignesh Kundaria is the Director and CEO of Fornnax Technology. Over an experience spanning more than two decades in the recycling industry, he has established himself as one of India’s foremost voices on waste-to-fuel technology and alternative fuel infrastructure.

Concrete

WCA Welcomes SiloConnect as associate corporate member

Published

3 weeks ago

April 13, 2026

admin

The World Cement Association (WCA) has announced SiloConnect as its newest associate corporate member, expanding its network of technology providers supporting digitalisation in the cement industry. SiloConnect offers smart sensor technology that provides real-time visibility of cement inventory levels at customer silos, enabling producers to monitor stock remotely and plan deliveries more efficiently. The solution helps companies move from reactive to proactive logistics, improving delivery planning, operational efficiency and safety by reducing manual inspections. The technology is already used by major cement producers such as Holcim, Cemex and Heidelberg Materials and is deployed across more than 30 countries worldwide.

Concrete

TotalEnergies and Holcim Launch Floating Solar Plant in Belgium

Published

3 weeks ago

April 13, 2026

admin

TotalEnergies and Holcim have commissioned a floating solar power plant in Obourg, Belgium, built on a rehabilitated former chalk quarry that has been converted into a lake. The project has a generation capacity of 31 MW and produces around 30 GWh of renewable electricity annually, which will be used to power Holcim’s nearby industrial operations. The project is currently the largest floating solar installation in Europe dedicated entirely to industrial self-consumption. To ensure minimal impact on the surrounding landscape, more than 700 metres of horizontal directional drilling were used to connect the solar installation to the electrical substation. The project reflects ongoing collaboration between the two companies to support industrial decarbonisation through renewable energy solutions and innovative infrastructure development.