USA: Holcim to sell Trident cement plant

Some of the 80 employees at the Trident cement plant near Three Forks thought the facility was safe from the antitrust hatchets that started swinging after the plant’s owner announced a merger with its primary competitor last year. But anyone who bet Trident would remain in the stable of assets owned by Holcim US Inc., has lost the wager.

The Trident plant will be sold to an Irish multinational, according to a joint statement issued Feb. 2 by Holcim and Lafarge, the companies whose $43 billion merger is expected to be final in the first half of this year. 

According to the statement, the assets to be divested include cement plants and other facilities in Europe, Canada, Brazil and the Philippines. The only U.S. holdings on the list are the Trident plant and some distribution facilities in the Great Lakes area. 

Holcim and Lafarge confirmed in the statement that the Irish building materials giant CRH had tendered a $7.4 billion offer (6.5 billion euros) to acquire the assets. If the deal is approved by regulators and CRH shareholders, it is expected to close by the end of June.

At No. 129 on the Fortune 500, CRH operates in 35 countries, employs 76,000 people worldwide and enjoys annual sales exceeding $20.3 billion. It is a leading producer of cement, aggregates and other building materials in Europe and other parts of the world, including China and India. 

CRH's North American arm is called Oldcastle. Based in Atlanta, Ga., Oldcastle was founded in 1977 and bills itself as "North America's largest manufacturer of building products and materials." 

Oldcastle leads the industry in the production of asphalt, aggregates, ready-mixed concrete, precast products and other construction materials. The company's growth strategy has been to acquire small- and medium-sized companies which keep their names and local focus. In Montana, it owns Helena Sand and Gravel in Helena and L.S. Jensen Construction & Ready Mix in Missoula. 

But Oldcastle doesn't manufacture cement; Trident would be CRH's only cement plant in North America, and whether it plans to operate the plant, sell it off or shut it down remains to be seen. The media relations office at CRH did not respond to our requests for comments for this story, but its chief executive told reporters during a Feb. 2 news conference that CRH likely will divest some of the assets it acquires from Holcim and Lafarge.

"Not all of these assets are going to remain long term in our group, that's for sure," CEO Albert Manifold said (as reported by Reuters for a Feb. 2 story. "Some of these assets, we will be required to take partners on."

Now more than 105 years old, the Trident plant has been owned by Holcim since the late 1980s. A significant economic force locally—employing more than six dozen people at relatively high wages for this area and kicking in six figures into the local tax base each year—Trident is the smallest of ten cement plants Holcim operates in the U.S., producing about 350,000 metric tons of product each year. By contrast, Holcim's Ste. Genevieve plant in Missouri, which opened in 2009 and is one of the largest cement plants in the world, produces more than 4 million metric tons.

Employees at Trident referred all calls about the merger to the company's Waltham, Mass., headquarters. Our efforts to reach a spokesperson, however, have been unsuccessful. 

While no Trident employees would speak on the record for this story because Holcim rigidly controls corporate communications, some employees anonymously told us that Holcim's decision to sell Trident was a surprise and “has everyone pretty stirred up.”

Another worker said local employees received no indication of sale plans from the corporate offices and were confused about the decision. 

“We thought we were okay—that we weren’t going to be affected” by the merger, the employee said. “This was a big shock. People are kind of stunned around here.”