The for sale sign is out front of building materials business Adbri, with two of its stakeholders set to acquire Australia’s second largest supplier of cement products.
Adbri was a pioneer of cement manufacturing in Australia in 1882 with its first Portland cement plant in Brighton in Adelaide. Now operating more than 200 plants and facilities, it is the second largest supplier of cement products in this country.
Irish building materials group, CRH, together with Victoria-based Barro Group, propose to take over Adbri and delist it from the ASX. Barro owns around 47.3% while CRH holds 4.6% and intends to purchase the remaining shares.
Barro Group operates more than 50 sites with 600 employees and hundreds of contractors and has pre-mixed concrete businesses in Queensland: Gladstone Premix, Hervey Bay Ready Mix, Townsville Concrete, and Mt Cotton Concrete.
CRH is a Fortune 500 company and operates in 29 countries with 75,800 employees. It has been operating in Australia for 15 years with 400 employees, CRH’s chief executive told the AFR.
“We have held a long-term interest in the Australian construction materials market, which has attractive attributes including stable market dynamics and positive growth prospects,” CRH chief executive Albert Manifold said in a statement on the acquisition.
On 1 January 2024, Adbri Cement also entered into an interim agreement with Independent Cement and Lime (ICL), a joint venture between Adbri and the Barro Group, for the supply and distribution of cementitious materials until the end of February.
About the author
Desi Corbett
Desi is our weekly news journalist and the editor of Concrete in Australia magazine for 10 years. She has been heavily involved in all forms of engineering since 2013; part of a 30-year writing career across a range of subjects and media.