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Cookstown Cement rebranding to Cemcor following £15m investment Cookstown-based cement production business has rebranded to Cemcor, following significant investment from the new ownership. Committed to investing £15m, the company now known as Cemcor has already begun to grow in stature with a fleet of new branded tanker and curtain sider vehicles on the roads and an increase in full time staff.
The Cookstown plant was originally established by Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers (APCM) and opened in 1968 with the capacity of around 0.5Mt/yr. Shortly afterwards, the plant came under the umbrella of the Blue Circle group, which was forming at the time. There were selected investments in the plant over the next 30 years under Blue Circle, but the plant continued with the same fundamental semi-dry configuration. Operation continued under Lafarge, which took over Blue Circle in 2001 and up until January 2022 the plant operated as Lafarge Ireland by Aggregate Industries (AI), running the ex-Lafarge cement plants in the UK, itself part of the Swiss multinational Holcim.
Cookstown Cement Ltd bought Lafarge Ireland from AI on 21 January 2022 for €67m, where the two shareholders are LCC Group with 80% share and Managing Director, David Millar, a former executive with Lafarge who has 38 years’ experience in the cement and construction industries,
with 20% share of the company. With unrealised potential the main driving force behind the acquisition, the company now owns a cement plant with production capacity in excess of 450,000 tonnes in Cookstown, a limestone quarry also in Cookstown, a shale quarry in
Cemcor plant in Cookstown.
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