Anhui Conch Cement: The Cost Leader's Survival Guide in Peak Cement China

I. Introduction & Episode Roadmap

Stand on the levee at Tongling, along the middle reaches of the Yangtze, and the entire business model of a Fortune Global 500 company moves past in about ninety seconds. A self-propelled barge, loaded to the waterline with grey clinker, slides downstream toward Nanjing. Behind it, a conveyor and crusher dismantle a limestone hill at a pace that would exhaust a typical European quarry in a decade. Above the hill, a rotary kiln the length of a football pitch burns at 1,450°C, operating twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and forty days a year, to convert ground rock into the most consumed manufactured substance on earth after water.

That operational engine belongs to 安徽海螺水泥股份有限公司 Anhui Conch Cement Company Limited — listed in Hong Kong as 0914.HK since 1997 and in Shanghai as 600585.SH since 2002. By the end of 2025, the company operated 234 million tonnes of clinker capacity, 415 million tonnes of cement capacity, 180 million tonnes of aggregates capacity, and 70.25 million cubic metres of ready-mix concrete capacity.¹ No single corporate entity on the planet manufactures more cement.

Yet the core story is not its sheer scale, but what happens to scale when the underlying demand driver recedes.

In 2023, Conch generated revenue of roughly RMB 141 billion.² By 2025, revenue had fallen to RMB 82.53 billion — a 9.33% drop year-over-year and part of a three-year contraction exceeding 40%.³ Attributable net profit, which reached RMB 33–35 billion annually during the peak years from 2019 to 2021, fell to RMB 8.46 billion in 2025 under international accounting standards.³ The company earned roughly a quarter of its peak profits, on a shrinking top line, in a market where national cement output dropped to a seventeen-year low.⁴

The central question is not whether Conch is an efficiently run industrial asset; its operational efficiency is well documented. The sharper inquiry is structural: is Anhui Conch the cost-moated survivor that consolidates the wreckage of Chinese heavy industry, or is it a superbly engineered machine bolted to a market that is structurally, permanently smaller?

The strategic hook lies in its business mechanism. A provincial state kiln in the hills of southern Anhui recognized early that cement manufacturing is fundamentally a logistics business. Rock and heat are low-cost inputs; transporting heavy grey powder across distances is expensive. Conch built its operational strategy on the arbitrage among these factors, converting the Yangtze River into a natural conveyor belt. This created the company's signature "T-Strategy" (T字形战略), establishing a two-decade cost advantage, a substantial net cash balance sheet rare among Chinese state-owned enterprises, and, for years, industry-leading returns.

Then China's real estate sector contracted.

The analysis unfolds across seven key themes:

1. The origin. A 1978 mountain cement plant, a materials engineer named 郭文叁 Guo Wensan, and the moment a river became a regional distribution network.
2. The moat anatomy. Ten-thousand-tonne kilns, waste-heat power generation, captive limestone reserves, and barge economics — alongside an analysis of whether these assets produced genuine pricing power.
3. The golden era. Supply-side structural reform (供给侧结构性改革), peak-shifting production (错峰生产), and the market dynamics created by state-enforced production discipline.
4. The contraction. Evergrande's collapse, the drop in new construction starts, and the 2023–2026 price war that unspooled industry coordination.
5. "One Foundation and Five Businesses" (一基五业). Aggregates, concrete, overseas expansion, green power — and an assessment of their material contribution to earnings.
6. Management and capital allocation. Governance under state ownership, a RMB 50 billion cash reserve, equity investment activities, and updated dividend policies.
7. Frameworks and key metrics. The bull and bear investment theses and the critical variables driving long-term valuation.

The story begins where many Chinese industrial transformations start: with a state plan and a hill.

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II. The Anhui Miracle: From State Kiln to Global Giant

In 1978, in the hills of Ningguo county in southern Anhui, the Chinese state began building a cement plant. It was not a glamorous posting. Ningguo sat well away from the coastal boom cities that would define the reform era; the plant existed because there was limestone in the ground and the province needed building material.

The same year, 郭文叁 Guo Wensan graduated from the building materials department of 同济大学 Tongji University in Shanghai. Two years later, he took a job at the Ningguo Cement Plant.⁵ He would spend the next thirty-five years there, guiding its development into the world's largest cement producer by volume.

The problem Guo inherited

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Chinese cement manufacturing was heavily fragmented. The industry relied on shaft kilns—small vertical furnaces, often village- or township-owned, producing a few hundred tonnes a day of low-grade, inconsistent cement. The contrast with modern industrial lines was stark: shaft kilns burned more coal per tonne, produced weaker cement, emitted high levels of dust, and could not be automated. However, they were inexpensive to build and could serve projects within a five-kilometre radius, which was essential in a country with primitive road infrastructure.

The result was an industry of thousands of subscale producers, each operating as a local monopolist without broader competitiveness. National cement output was immense in the aggregate but pitiful on a per-plant basis. A national cement company could not exist because national cement logistics did not exist.

The modern alternative was the New Suspension Preheater (NSP) dry-process line—a long rotary kiln fed by a cyclone tower that pre-heats raw meal using exhaust gas before it enters the furnace. The underlying thermal efficiency was straightforward: every degree of heat recovered from exhaust gas reduced coal requirements. NSP lines dramatically lowered fuel consumption, produced uniform high-grade clinker, and delivered significant economies of scale, making larger kilns far cheaper on a per-tonne basis. However, they required substantial upfront capital.

This created a structural trap: Chinese cement producers recognized the superior technology but lacked the capital required to adopt it.

1993–1997: the pivot

Guo became director of the Ningguo plant in 1993.⁵ Two strategic moves followed in rapid succession.

First, in 1995, Ningguo took control of the Tongling Cement Plant—a facility sitting directly on the Yangtze River.⁵ On paper, this was an ordinary consolidation of two provincial state assets. In practice, it was the first physical execution of a core principle: place clinker production directly where limestone reserves and river transport meet, rather than near end customers.

Second, on 1 September 1997, Anhui Conch Cement Company Limited was formally incorporated as the listed vehicle for the group's cement assets. Seven weeks later, on 21 October 1997, its H shares began trading in Hong Kong, making it the first Chinese cement company to list offshore. The offering placed 361 million shares and raised roughly RMB 880 million.⁶ An A-share listing in Shanghai followed on 7 February 2002.

For a provincial Chinese cement producer in 1997, RMB 880 million was transformative. It represented hard currency raised outside the domestic banking system at a time when Chinese state-owned enterprise credit was rationed by policy rather than project economics. Conch deployed the proceeds directly into NSP kilns.

The speed of this transaction underscores its underlying purpose. The company was incorporated on 1 September and listed on 21 October—a window of just seven weeks.⁶ Rather than spending years preparing an established operating business for public markets, Anhui provincial authorities carved prime cement assets out of a state group, structured them into a joint-stock entity, and listed them in Hong Kong specifically to secure growth capital.

While many Chinese state-owned enterprises listed in Hong Kong during the late 1990s as a routine financing or governance exercise, Conch used its capital for immediate technology substitution. By replacing shaft kilns with modern NSP lines nearly a decade ahead of domestic rivals, the offshore listing provided the capital to establish an operational lead while competitors remained financially constrained.

Guo Wensan managed the company through this transformation until his retirement in 2015, and the character of his tenure was visible in strategic choices.⁵ Conch avoided property development—a sector entered by many Chinese industrial groups in the 2000s—and abstained from revenue-building commodity trading. Instead, it focused on constructing large kilns, acquiring quarry concessions, and driving down unit production costs. The internal culture benchmarked every plant line on coal consumption, power usage, and refractory lifespan.

That operational discipline persisted in Conch's management systems. The company continuously benchmarked line-by-line performance metrics, publishing internal rankings that forced plant managers to compete on thermal efficiency, measured down to grams of coal per kilogram of clinker. In a commodity market where product differentiation is minimal and market pricing dominates, unit-cost control served as the central management discipline.

Securing the bedrock

The third component of Conch's foundational strategy was securing long-term mineral rights.

Through the late 1990s and 2000s, Conch systematically locked up long-dated concessions over high-grade limestone in Wuhu, Tongling, Anqing, and Chizhou—a stretch along the middle and lower Yangtze where major limestone deposits sit adjacent to deep navigable water. Cement manufacturing requires three elements in close proximity: limestone, energy, and low-cost transport. Along that corridor, all three aligned.

The strategic value of these reserves increased after 2015, when China tightened environmental and land-use regulations. Securing new large-scale limestone concessions near navigable waterways became nearly impossible due to ecological protection zones, Yangtze River protection laws, and stricter provincial mineral auctions. Consequently, Conch's limestone deposits represented an unrepeatable permitting-era asset rather than a replicable technological edge.

However, unreplicable reserves do not automatically guarantee pricing power. The degree to which these structural assets translated into sustained economic moats is examined in the subsequent section.

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III. The Moat Anatomy: The Yangtze "T-Strategy" and Cost Supremacy

On a map of eastern China, the Yangtze River flows west to east, intersecting a coastal economic belt that stretches north to south from Shandong through Shanghai, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong. Together, these natural and industrial shipping routes form a capital letter T on its side—the visual basis of Conch's signature "T-Strategy" (T字形战略).

The vertical arm: make it where the rock is

The vertical stem of the T represents production. Rather than scattering small plants near end customers—the traditional industry approach—Conch concentrated massive clinker capacity at a handful of mineral-rich locations along the Yangtze, including Tongling, Wuhu, Anqing, and Chizhou.

Geographic concentration unlocked the single most important cost lever in cement manufacturing: kiln scale. While the industry standard was a 5,000-tonne-per-day line, Conch pioneered ten-thousand-tonne-per-day production lines (万吨线) across China. Doubling kiln throughput does not double fixed overhead: a single control room, one maintenance crew, and shared permitting requirements serve the larger line, while thermal heat loss per tonne through the kiln shell shrinks proportionately. It is the industrial equivalent of operating one massive data center rather than dozens of server closets.

The horizontal arm: let the river do the hauling

The horizontal bar of the T represents distribution. Bulk cement is heavy, low-value, and perishable, absorbing moisture over time. Transporting it by truck beyond 150 to 200 kilometers destroys project economics, as freight costs quickly outstrip product value. Historically, this geographic barrier prevented the emergence of national cement leaders anywhere in the world, locking the industry into a patchwork of local regional monopolies.

Water transport breaks that physical constraint. Barges move clinker at a fraction of the per-tonne cost of road transport, and the Yangtze accommodates deep-draft vessels well past Anhui. Conch capitalized on this waterway by manufacturing intermediate clinker upstream near its quarries, shipping it downstream to grinding stations located inside major consumption hubs across Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Guangdong, and processing it into finished cement at the point of sale.

The core efficiency lies in what gets shipped: clinker rather than finished cement. Clinker consists of the semi-finished nodules emitted by rotary kilns; grinding clinker with gypsum and additives yields cement. By decoupling production from grinding, Conch placed the capital-, permit-, and emissions-intensive phase where limestone was abundant, while placing the inexpensive, flexible finishing phase near end customers. This structure also allowed plant operators to blend clinker into specific grades tailored to local market requirements.

This logistical model expanded Conch's economic distribution radius from 200 kilometers to more than 1,000 kilometers—a corridor encompassing China's highest-GDP coastal markets.

The framework also inverted traditional operational risk. A conventional cement kiln is a fixed bet on a single local market: if county construction halts, the kiln stops. By contrast, an upstream Conch clinker base can reallocate output across grinding stations along 1,000 kilometers of coastline to match regional demand pockets. The kiln functions as a flexible national asset rather than a localized facility. That flexibility explains why Conch's shipment volumes have held up comparatively better than national output metrics during the industry downturn.

The contrast with its principal state-owned competitor highlights this operational divergence. China National Building Material Group (中国建材集团有限公司, or CNBM) expanded primarily by acquiring hundreds of existing plants nationwide and consolidating them under listed entities, most notably Tianshan Cement (天山股份), which absorbed CNBM's core cement assets. While this strategy generated substantial headline capacity, it yielded a heterogeneous fleet of kilns of varying vintages, operating costs, and locations, laden with acquisition debt and goodwill. Where CNBM purchased market share, Conch engineered an integrated cost curve.

Grinding out the last few yuan

Beyond structural distribution, Conch reinforced its advantage through process engineering.

Waste heat recovery (余热发电). Cement kilns discharge substantial low-grade thermal exhaust. In 1998, Conch Group installed a 6,480-kilowatt low-temperature waste-heat power generation unit—the earliest deployment of the technology in China's cement industry. Beginning in 2005, the company expanded waste-heat systems fleet-wide, and in August 2006 commissioned its first fully self-designed and self-equipped project on a 5,000-tonne-per-day line at the Ningguo plant.⁷ Operating much like a hybrid vehicle recovering kinetic braking energy, the system captures electricity from thermal exhaust without burning additional fuel, permanently lowering purchased electricity costs across its fleet.

Fuel and materials substitution. Financial results from 2025 illustrate how unit-level operational efficiencies compound. Conch's comprehensive unit cost for self-produced cement and clinker fell 11.12% year-over-year. Fuel and power costs dropped 15.70% to RMB 87.47 per tonne, while raw material costs declined 10.85% to RMB 32.53 per tonne.¹ Lower coal prices contributed to the drop, alongside alternative fuel usage, centralized procurement, and logistics optimization.

These cost reductions directly insulated operating margins. In 2025, despite average selling prices for self-produced cement and clinker dropping to approximately RMB 230 per tonne, Conch generated roughly RMB 64 in gross profit and RMB 30 in net profit per tonne.¹ Group gross margin on self-produced goods expanded by 2.95 percentage points to 27.76% even as total revenue contracted.¹ Because unit production costs fell faster than market prices, Conch delivered margin expansion during a severe cyclical downturn.

Historical falsification: does the T-Strategy actually confer pricing power?

A core bullish thesis maintains that "Conch's river logistics and low-cost kiln network make it structurally immune to downturns and give it pricing power along the Yangtze."

The company's operating performance between 2022 and 2026 challenges the pricing-power argument, revealing how river logistics function during industry contractions.

Water transport routes operate symmetrically. The same river channels that allow Conch to move low-cost clinker downstream also allow competing producers to ship surplus volume into coastal markets. As construction demand in East China weakened, the Yangtze turned into an avenue for regional market clearance rather than an exclusive distribution corridor. Manufacturers in landlocked provinces such as Shandong and Henan routed excess output into coastal ports to maintain kiln cash flows, accepting discounted prices that covered marginal operating costs rather than idling capacity.

Industry data highlights the extent of market pressure. In the first half of 2026, national cement output dropped 8% year-over-year to 736 million tonnes—the lowest level in over a decade. The national cement price index dropped 15.4% year-over-year to 94.56 points by June 2026, while clinker capacity utilization fell to approximately 48%.⁴ Conch's financial performance reflected these sector-wide price reductions: in the first quarter of 2026, the company's average realized price per tonne reached RMB 214, down RMB 32 year-over-year, while self-produced sales volumes declined about 9%.⁸

Had the T-Strategy conferred pricing power, realization rates in East China would have held above national benchmarks. Instead, Conch's cost structure secured relative margin survival rather than price control.

Conclusion, calibrated: Conch's moat consists of a relative cost advantage rather than pricing power. This structural position was reflected in 2025 when Conch expanded gross margins while competitors suffered losses, and peers issued profit warnings—such as West China Cement (西部水泥), which projected a 45% to 50% decline in first-half 2026 net profit.⁹ Low-cost river logistics reduce landed delivery costs, but they do not eliminate regional price competition. Moving forward, if realized prices in East China persistently lag national averages while Conch's volumes stabilize, market evidence confirms the cost-survivor thesis over the market-control model.

A direct peer comparison underscores this structural divide. In 2025, China National Building Material recorded revenue of RMB 177.85 billion—more than double Conch's top line—yet generated an attributable net loss of RMB 3.75 billion, reversing a RMB 2.39 billion profit from the prior year.¹⁰ By contrast, Conch generated RMB 8.11 billion in net profit on less than half of CNBM's revenue.³

This divergence demonstrates the mechanics of a true cost moat: while low production costs cannot prevent price drops, they determine which producer remains profitable when market prices fall.

That distinction—between a cost-moated survivor and a price-setting monopolist—defines Conch's position in a contracting market.

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IV. Supply-Side Reforms, Peak Cement, and the 2016–2021 Golden Era

Corporate memory can be misleading when an era of exceptional profitability is remembered as the product of internal execution rather than state policy. The performance of the Chinese cement industry between 2016 and 2021 provides a clear case study.

Inflection one: the four trillion

In late 2008, as the global financial crisis dampened export demand, Beijing introduced an RMB 4 trillion economic stimulus package heavily weighted toward infrastructure and construction. For cement manufacturers, the policy triggered an immediate demand shock. Highways, high-speed rail networks, airports, subway systems, and residential housing projects expanded simultaneously nationwide.

Cement producers across China responded by expanding production capacity. Conch built capacity faster and on a larger scale than peers, but financed its expansion predominantly through operating cash flows rather than the heavy bank debt accumulated by competitors. This conservative leverage strategy left Conch with a robust net-cash balance sheet as the industry entered the 2020s.

However, widespread construction created severe industry-wide overcapacity. By the mid-2010s, domestic cement production capacity far exceeded structural demand. Capacity utilization fell, prices dropped, and a substantial portion of the industry became unprofitable. Allowing market-driven insolvencies was politically unviable, as regional cement plants served as essential county-level employers and local tax bases.

Inflection two: supply-side structural reform

In response, Beijing implemented supply-side structural reform (供给侧结构性改革) across the cement sector beginning around 2015. Policy enforcement relied on two central mechanisms.

The first was a strict prohibition on net new clinker capacity through capacity replacement ratios, requiring producers to retire greater capacity than any new line added. This policy turned operating permits into scarce, valuable assets and halted unrestricted physical expansion.

However, restricting permits introduced secondary distortions. As clinker permits became scarce, producers had strong incentives to maximize output beyond nominal limits. An operating line registered at 5,000 tonnes per day could, through technical debottlenecking, output significantly more. Over a decade, the gap between registered and actual capacity expanded to between 20% and 40% among certain producers.¹¹ Consequently, nominal capacity caps diverged from physical output, prompting subsequent regulatory efforts to align declared capacity with operational reality.

The second mechanism was peak-shifting production (错峰生产), which mandated seasonal kiln shutdowns during winter heating periods in northern provinces and during environmental alerts. While framed around environmental objectives—given that kilns generate significant particulate and nitrogen oxide emissions—peak-shifting functioned commercially as a state-enforced production quota. The policy removed surplus supply on a coordinated schedule that private industry coordination could not have maintained.

The environmental framework served genuine public health goals, as winter kiln curtailments measurably improved air quality in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei corridor. Concurrently, the policy acted as an industrial price-support program. By effectively taxing downstream construction projects to recapitalize cement manufacturers, state policy stabilized a financially vulnerable materials sector.

What the golden era actually produced

The structural intervention produced a sharp financial recovery. Realized prices rebounded, lifting Conch's annual revenue toward the RMB 140–157 billion range through 2021. Attributable net profit consolidated in the RMB 33–35 billion range from 2019 to 2021, with total profit peaking at RMB 47.1 billion in 2020.¹² Return on equity exceeded 20%, and sustained free cash flow allowed Conch to eliminate external net debt.

These results prompted two distinct interpretations of Conch's market position.

The first reading contends that state capacity discipline allowed Conch's structural cost advantage to express itself fully, proving that elevated profits reflected genuine operational supremacy.

The second reading holds that peak-shifting elevated industry-wide prices to support marginal producers, allowing Conch to capture an expanded margin spread simply by occupying the lowest point on the cost curve. Under this framework, excess returns represented a policy-derived rent rather than pure market pricing power, remaining dependent on administrative supply enforcement.

Subsequent market dynamics after 2022 support the second interpretation, with a key caveat. When policy compliance weakened, Conch's absolute margins contracted sharply alongside the industry. However, Conch's margins compressed less than peers', enabling the company to remain profitable while competitors recorded operating losses. While structural cost leadership determines relative profitability among peers, administrative policy dictates overall market price levels.

This distinction became critical as policy-driven supply coordination began to unspool.

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V. The Real Estate Crunch & The Price War Reality Check (2022–2026)

The primary catalyst behind the contraction in Chinese cement demand is straightforward: real estate construction slowed sharply.

Peak cement, and what came after

National cement production peaked at roughly 2.38 billion tonnes around 2020. By the first half of 2026, the six-month run-rate had fallen to 736 million tonnes—annualizing below 1.6 billion tonnes, a level last seen in the early 2010s.⁴ Over the same six-month period, real estate investment fell 18% and new construction floor area contracted by 23.4%, while infrastructure investment—long expected to act as a counter-cyclical shock absorber—turned negative at -2.4%.⁴

This downturn in infrastructure spending highlights a critical structural constraint. Consensus models long assumed that public works would offset real estate declines. However, in the first half of 2026, infrastructure spending instead compounded the contraction. Because municipal land sales to property developers historically funded local government budgets, the real estate slump directly impaired municipal spending capacity, weakening the secondary pillar of cement demand.

Demographics and urbanization trends reinforce this shift. Cement demand is a function of new floor space, which depends on household formation, urbanization rates, and replacement cycles. With China's urbanization decelerating and household formation slowing against an ample existing housing stock, residential cement demand is unlikely to return to 2020 peak levels. This structural shift marks a permanent contraction rather than a typical cyclical trough.

The cartel breaks

Operational pressures on secondary producers unraveled industry supply discipline. For a mid-sized provincial cement producer carrying RMB 8 billion in bank debt and operating kilns at 50% capacity, adhering to a mandatory forty-day seasonal peak-shifting shutdown threatened immediate solvency. Compliance eliminated the revenue needed for debt service, whereas operating kilns and discounting prices provided vital short-term liquidity. Once individual indebted producers began discounting, industry coordination dissolved across regional markets.

Industry reports from the first half of 2026 record that peak-shifting restrictions had "limited policy effectiveness," with local compliance varying substantially, kiln inventories remaining elevated, and competition pushing prices continuously downward.⁴ The national cement price index fell 7.9% from the start of 2026 to June alone, on top of the 15.4% year-over-year decline.⁴ Meanwhile, coal prices rose 13.25% over the same period.⁴

This breakdown developed unevenly across regions. Defections were most severe in provinces with fragmented ownership and heavy debt loads—such as Henan, Shandong, and parts of the northeast—prompting producers to export surplus volume into coastal markets. By mid-2026, regional price dispersion became extreme: bulk P.O 42.5 cement averaged around RMB 585 per tonne in Tibet compared to roughly RMB 222 in Henan, with 28 of 31 provinces posting year-over-year declines and the national average falling 17% to around RMB 288 per tonne.¹³ This wide inter-provincial gap reflected local financial distress and freight economics rather than localized demand.

These market dynamics challenged early investor assumptions that state-mandated peak-shifting provided a permanent solution to overcapacity. While administrative supply discipline held during periods of moderate stress, compliance unraveled when severe revenue declines threatened firm solvency, demonstrating that administrative quotas function as temporary supports rather than permanent structural moats.

Conch's choice

Faced with widespread discounting, a producer with low unit costs and a strong balance sheet faces two strategic options: act as a swing producer by curtailing output to support regional prices, or defend market share by accepting lower prices and allowing its cost advantage to pressure weaker peers.

Conch chose to defend its market share. At the 2025 results briefing, management framed the posture as "profitability is the goal, market share is the foundation" (效益为目标、份额为基础), emphasizing cost control and volume stability over price defense.¹⁴ In 2025, Conch's self-produced cement and clinker volumes reached 265 million tonnes, down 1.1% in a market where national output was falling far faster.¹

While management used this phrasing to balance volume defense with earnings goals, market analysts repeatedly questioned whether Conch would eventually cut output to defend regional pricing. Throughout the 2024 and 2025 results cycles, management consistently redirected attention toward controllable operational factors: unit costs, logistics, alternative fuels, digital plant management, and non-cement revenue.¹⁴

With half the national kiln fleet idle, any volume Conch declines to sell is a volume immediately available to a competitor with worse costs and more debt.⁴ Under those market conditions, curtailing output would cede market share rather than support prices. Conch's choice aligns with cost-curve economics, though it makes the company an active participant in the ongoing price war.

The financial arithmetic of that strategic choice unfolded over two years. Revenue fell from roughly RMB 141 billion in 2023 to RMB 91.03 billion in 2024—a 35.5% drop, though a substantial portion of that decline resulted from deliberately scaling back low-margin trading operations rather than core manufacturing.¹⁵ Attributable net profit fell 26.2% in 2024 to RMB 7.70 billion under Chinese accounting standards, with sales volume down 7.5% to 271 million tonnes.¹⁵

However, 2025 produced a clear divergence: revenue dropped another 9.33% to RMB 82.53 billion, but attributable net profit rose 5.42% to RMB 8.11 billion under Chinese standards and RMB 8.46 billion under international standards.³ Profitability expanded because unit production costs fell faster than realized selling prices, providing concrete evidence of the company's relative cost resilience during a sharp downturn.

Margin resilience faced stronger headwinds in 2026. First-quarter revenue fell 10.45% to RMB 17.07 billion and attributable profit fell 18.98% to RMB 1.47 billion, with gross margin compressing from 22.88% to 21.26%.⁸¹⁶ Operating cash flow fell over 35%.¹⁶ After delivering an 11% unit cost reduction in 2025, operational cost cuts provided less offset against a RMB 32 per tonne drop in realized prices. The board met on 26 August 2026 to approve interim results for the six months to 30 June and to consider an interim dividend.¹⁷

What the evidence means: Conch's cost structure has demonstrated resilience under severe stress, converting a top-line revenue decline into expanded net profit in 2025. However, performance metrics confirm that Conch remains a price taker in a structurally shrinking market, without the ability to dictate market prices. As unit cost reductions encounter diminishing returns, management's strategic emphasis has increasingly pivoted toward non-cement diversification.

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VI. "One Foundation & Five Businesses": Aggregates, Overseas, and Green Transformation

Every mature commodity producer eventually presents a strategic vision showing it is no longer just a commodity company. Conch's framework is "One Foundation and Five Businesses" (一基五业)—with cement as the core foundation, supported by five growth pillars: aggregates, concrete, new energy, environmental services, and international expansion.

The strategic logic is clear, but the core issue is scale. Evaluating these segments by their material contribution to group earnings reveals their true strategic weight.

Cement and clinker: still essentially everything

Self-produced cement and clinker generated roughly RMB 61 billion of the group's RMB 82.53 billion in 2025 revenue—about three-quarters of the top line, and an even larger share of net profit given its margin profile.¹³ None of the diversification initiatives alter the underlying reality: Conch remains overwhelmingly a cement company, and any analysis treating the ancillary businesses as immediate swing factors in group earnings miscalculates the balance sheet.

Aggregates: high margin, small, and now under pressure

Aggregates (骨料) and manufactured sand (机制砂) are the crushed rock and engineered sand that form the primary bulk of concrete. Conch's rationale for this expansion is structurally sound: the company already owns and operates limestone quarries, holds the mining permits, and maintains the crushing and conveyor infrastructure. Converting extracted rock into saleable aggregate rather than kiln feed requires minimal incremental capital and yields attractive gross margins.

Those margins are substantial. In 2025, aggregates delivered gross margins near 40%, compared to roughly 20% for cement.¹ Total aggregates capacity reached 180 million tonnes by year-end.¹

However, the segment faces structural market tests. Thesis claim: "Aggregates will create a high-margin second growth curve offsetting declining cement volumes."

The financial results from 2025 challenge this premise. Aggregates revenue generated approximately RMB 4.2 billion to RMB 4.3 billion—roughly 5% of group revenue, well below the double-digit share implied by growth projections. Segment revenue fell between 8% and 10% year-over-year, while gross margins compressed by five to seven percentage points.¹ The business contracted in the same year it was expected to cushion cement declines.

This compression stems from rapid capacity additions across the industry. Because quarry-adjacent processing requires modest capital, state-owned construction groups and mining companies entered the market heavily after 2022. National average sand and gravel prices dropped 12.1% in 2024 to RMB 93.3 per tonne, with manufactured sand falling 16%. Industry associations documented expanding overcapacity along the Yangtze corridor and in the Greater Bay Area—Conch's core markets—where new capacity along the Yangtze alone expanded by hundreds of millions of tonnes.¹⁸

Conclusion: The thesis is rejected in its strong form. Aggregates represent a high-margin, capital-efficient extension of Conch's existing asset base, but they function as a smaller iteration of the broader commodity cycle rather than a distinct growth curve, operating in a market confronting its own oversupply. Revalidating the thesis would require aggregates gross profit to grow in absolute RMB terms for two consecutive years while cement gross profit declines—a benchmark the segment has not achieved.

Ready-mix concrete: growing, but structurally worse economics

Commercial ready-mix concrete (商品混凝土) represented the single growing business segment in 2025. Revenue rose roughly 20% to approximately RMB 3.2 billion, with gross margins around 12%.¹ Total concrete capacity reached 70.25 million cubic metres by year-end.¹

Yet forward integration into ready-mix concrete introduces structural financial trade-offs. Ready-mix concrete is sold directly to construction contractors. In a prolonged real estate downturn, expanding concrete sales requires extending trade credit to property developers and builders, transforming a cash-generative business model into a receivables-heavy exposure. Ready-mix carries the lowest gross margins in the corporate portfolio along with the highest working-capital requirements and credit-loss exposure. Generating 20% growth in this environment reflects a deliberate strategic choice that increases exposure to sector-wide credit risks.

Overseas: better margins, marginal scale

International expansion represents management's primary strategic focus. Overseas revenue reached RMB 5.85 billion in 2025, up 24.99% year-over-year, with gross margins expanding nearly 11 percentage points to 43.31%—roughly double domestic levels.¹¹⁴ Conch has established operations across Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Uzbekistan, deploying its low-cost preheater kiln model into developing markets with rising cement demand.

Thesis claim: "Belt and Road (一带一路) expansion provides a fast-growing international hedge against domestic saturation."

The operational timeline places this growth in context. Conch has pursued international expansion for over a decade, commissioning eleven overseas clinker lines with a combined annual capacity of 16.5 million tonnes.¹⁹ By comparison, domestic clinker capacity stands at 234 million tonnes.¹ After ten years of capital deployment, international revenue accounts for roughly 7% of group top line—providing meaningful margin support, but remaining insufficient to offset domestic revenue contractions.

Furthermore, international markets carry localized capacity risks. Indonesia, Conch's primary overseas market, has experienced tightening supply-demand dynamics as domestic producers and international competitors—including Huaxin Cement (华新水泥)—added capacity. While Conch's plant cost engineering translates effectively abroad, the unique logistical advantage of the Yangtze River corridor cannot be replicated.

Conclusion: The thesis requires calibration rather than outright rejection. Overseas operations represent the highest-margin segment in the group portfolio, and the 2025 growth acceleration was material. However, with international sales representing 7% of revenue after a decade of investment, the pace at which capital deployment translates into group-level earnings remains gradual. The business remains a high-quality operation that is currently too small to reshape overall corporate earnings. The key indicator of long-term strategic impact is whether overseas gross profit expands to exceed 15% of group gross profit, whereas margin compression toward domestic levels would signal market saturation across Southeast Asia.

Green energy and environmental services

Conch has deployed captive solar and energy storage systems across its production facilities, integrated municipal and industrial waste co-processing into its kilns, and conducted pilot projects for carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS). Strategically, these initiatives serve defensive operational functions: reducing purchased power expenditures, securing waste-treatment fees, and preparing for carbon market compliance. Under current disclosure, these activities operate as cost-reduction mechanisms rather than independent profit centres.

Capital commitment to these projects has been substantial. In 2022, Conch launched an RMB 5 billion renewable energy program targeting photovoltaic installations across its facilities and approximately one gigawatt of installed solar capacity by the end of that year, generating roughly one billion kilowatt-hours annually.²⁰ Cement production facilities possess distinct structural advantages for solar adoption: large industrial roof footprints, continuous power demand, and existing internal power distribution networks built for waste-heat recovery systems. Consuming self-generated solar power behind the meter bypasses grid transmission tariffs, delivering superior returns compared to commercial solar generation.

However, decarbonization in cement manufacturing is governed by chemical constraints. Approximately 98% of direct carbon emissions in cement production derive from two sources: the chemical calcination of limestone—where calcium carbonate decomposes into lime and carbon dioxide—and the high-temperature combustion of coal in rotary kilns.²¹ On-site solar installations and waste-heat recovery address only a portion of energy-related emissions, leaving the chemical emissions from calcination untouched. Because calcination emissions are chemically inherent to process inputs, the sector's inclusion in national carbon trading markets presents a fundamental structural hurdle distinct from industrial sectors like steel, where electric arc furnaces can replace coal-based production. Beyond downstream carbon capture pilots, reducing calcination emissions requires lowering overall clinker output.

Collectively, Conch's five ancillary businesses serve a constructive operational purpose: stabilizing margins and slowing earnings decay. However, financial disclosures confirm that they do not replace core cement manufacturing, making capital allocation and cash management the central determinants of long-term shareholder value.

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VII. Management Credibility, Capital Allocation & SOE Governance

In May 2024, a Chinese court sentenced 王诚 Wang Cheng to eleven years and six months in prison and fined him RMB 2 million for bribery and abuse of power. The court found he had taken bribes totalling RMB 26.37 million between 1999 and 2022, in exchange for assistance with matters including corporate equity acquisitions, project planning adjustments, and bond issuance.²²

From May 2021 to May 2022, Wang Cheng was the legal representative and chairman of Anhui Conch Cement.²²

That is the correct place to begin a section on governance at this company, because it is the fact most likely to be omitted from a bull-case write-up. Conch is a well-run industrial operator. It is also a provincial state-owned enterprise embedded in a political system, and its chairmanship has passed through hands that a court subsequently found criminally compromised. Any assessment of "management quality" that does not carry that on its face is not an assessment.

The structure

Conch sits under 安徽海螺集团有限责任公司 Anhui Conch Holdings, which in turn sits under the Anhui provincial state asset system. Control is not contestable. There is no activist path, no proxy fight, no realistic prospect of a hostile approach. Minority holders — including every H-share investor in 0914.HK — are along for the ride on decisions made within a state hierarchy that answers to provincial and national policy objectives as well as to profit.

This is not a scandal; it is the terms of the deal. But it has concrete consequences for how you read management incentives. Executive compensation at Chinese central and provincial SOEs is benchmarked to state metrics — economic value added, emissions intensity, safety, risk control — rather than to share price. Insider equity ownership among senior management is minimal. Nobody at the top of Conch gets rich if the stock re-rates. That cuts both ways: it removes the incentive to financially engineer, and it removes the incentive to care about the share price at all.

The current bench

Chairman 杨军 Yang Jun took the chair in 2022, following the Wang Cheng interlude, with a background in state industrial asset management. His public emphasis has been on stability, carbon compliance, digital modernisation and cost control rather than expansion — a defensible reading of the moment.

General Manager 余水 Yu Shui was appointed effective 11 August 2025, succeeding 李群峰 Li Qunfeng, who resigned the general manager role the same day citing an adjustment of his own work commitments and scope of duties.²³²⁴ Yu was born in October 1976, graduated from Anhui University, and joined the company in 1997 — meaning he has spent his entire career inside Conch, and arrived in the year of the Hong Kong listing.²³ Before becoming general manager he served as an executive director, board secretary, general legal counsel and chief compliance officer.²³

That biography is worth reading carefully. Yu is not an outside change agent and was not brought in to restructure. He is a lifer whose most recent roles were legal, compliance and board governance rather than commercial. Elevating a compliance-and-legal executive to run operations during a downturn signals continuity and risk containment, not strategic reinvention. Investors hoping for a new capital allocation philosophy should adjust expectations accordingly.

The capital allocation record — tested

Conch's capital allocation deserves scrutiny precisely because the balance sheet is so strong that the opportunity cost of getting it wrong is large.

The listed-equity habit. Between 2015 and 2022, Conch repeatedly bought stakes in listed peers and adjacent companies. It subscribed to a placement in 西部水泥 West China Cement in 2015 and built its position over time. In 2021 it accumulated 5% of 亚泰集团 Yatai Group through open-market purchases between July and October.²⁵ In December 2021 it invested RMB 1.76 billion for a 16.3% stake in 西部建设 West China Construction via a private placement.²⁶ It also took positions in 上峰水泥 Shangfeng Cement and 天山股份 Tianshan.

The timing is the problem. These were deployed in 2021 — at or very near the cyclical peak in Chinese building materials equities — and the sector subsequently derated severely. Some positions sit in long-term equity investments, others in financial assets marked through profit or loss, which means the group's reported earnings have carried mark-to-market noise from what is essentially a proprietary equity book run by a cement company. It is worth stating plainly: this is not a demonstrated competence. A cement operator buying minority stakes in other listed cement operators at the top of the cycle is doing something closer to sector beta than to strategic consolidation, since minority stakes confer neither control nor synergies.

What it did not do. The counterweight is real and should be given its due. Conch did not do the thing that destroyed value at many global cement peers: it did not lever up for a transformational acquisition at a peak multiple. Its 2026 M&A has been small and industrially logical — RMB 275 million for cement assets near Chaohu from Anhui Wanwei High-Tech and RMB 344 million for an Inner Mongolia facility, transactions explicitly framed as resolving potential related-party competition after the controlling shareholder acquired the Wanwei group.¹⁶ Total planned 2026 capital expenditure is RMB 11.82 billion, directed at core projects, value-chain extension, energy retrofits and new capacity cultivation.¹¹⁶ Against roughly RMB 16.6 billion of 2025 operating cash flow, that is a company living within its means.¹

The fair verdict: capital allocation has been conservative and occasionally sloppy, not disciplined-and-surgical. The balance sheet was protected. The equity portfolio was a distraction that consumed capital at a bad time.

The cash pile

At the end of 2025 Conch held roughly RMB 50.3 billion in cash and bank balances, down about 28% from RMB 70.2 billion a year earlier — largely a reclassification into wealth-management products rather than a genuine drawdown — against interest-bearing debt of roughly RMB 27 billion and a gearing ratio of 20.42%, itself down 0.89 percentage points.²⁷

The activist critique writes itself. A company earning single-digit returns on a very large pool of low-yielding financial assets is diluting its own return on invested capital. The underlying cement operations, even at cyclical trough profitability, earn more than a bank deposit. Holding the cash is a bet on a consolidation opportunity that has not yet arrived, financed by every shareholder's foregone return. And in a market where the industry regulator is actively discussing capacity clearing, the counter-argument — that dry powder is exactly what you want when distressed assets come up — is not unreasonable. But it has now been the argument for four years.

The course correction

The pressure has produced a response, and it is the most shareholder-friendly thing Conch has done in its history. Against the backdrop of state-owned enterprise market-value management (国企市值管理) guidance, Conch committed at its 2025 results briefing to returning no less than 50% of annual net profit to shareholders through dividends and buybacks each year through 2027.¹⁴ For 2025 it paid RMB 0.85 per share in total — an interim of RMB 0.24 and a final of RMB 0.61 — for a payout ratio of 55.29%.¹³²⁸

This is a genuine, quantified, multi-year commitment with a floor, which is a meaningfully higher standard of promise than the aspirational language most Chinese SOEs offer. It is also the correct answer to the ROIC critique: if you cannot deploy the cash at attractive returns, return it.

The context is not purely voluntary, and that is worth naming. Chinese regulators have pushed listed state enterprises toward explicit market-value management, and a higher, more predictable payout is the path of least resistance for an SOE told to care about its share price. Conch is doing the right thing, but it is doing the right thing under instruction, which is a weaker signal about management's own capital-allocation philosophy than a payout policy adopted unprompted would be. The interesting test is what happens when the guidance is no longer new.

How to judge management from here: the promise is on the record and dated. It runs through 2027. The test is not whether the payout ratio is honoured in a year when profits are stable — it is whether it is honoured in a year when profits fall further, which is the scenario the first quarter of 2026 makes plausible. A payout ratio that mysteriously slips below 50% during a bad year would tell you a great deal about how binding the commitment really was.

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VIII. Strategic Frameworks, Bull vs. Bear Case & Key Investor KPIs

Let us assemble the argument.

Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers

Scale Economies — Strong. The 万吨线 argument holds. Larger kilns spread fixed cost, labour, and thermal loss over more tonnes, and Conch operates more of them than anyone. The 2025 cost reduction of 11.12% per tonne is the receipt.¹

Cornered Resource — Strong, and probably the most durable of the seven. Long-dated, high-grade limestone concessions co-located with deepwater Yangtze access. The rock can be found elsewhere; the permit to mine it next to navigable water, granted under a pre-2015 environmental regime, cannot be re-created. This is the one power that time strengthens rather than erodes.

Process Power — Moderate to strong. Waste heat generation, alternative fuels, captive logistics, and digital plant control produce a persistent unit-cost gap. The caveat: process advantages diffuse. Waste heat recovery was proprietary in 1998; it is standard now. What Conch retains is a compounding execution edge rather than a technological secret.

Counter-Positioning — Weak to absent. There is no business model here that incumbents cannot copy because copying would cannibalise them. Conch is the incumbent. It has no answer to demand contraction that competitors cannot also attempt.

Switching Costs — None. Cement to a specified grade is cement. Buyers switch on landed price and delivery reliability.

Network Effects — None.

Brand — Weak. The 海螺 Conch mark carries some reputational weight on quality consistency with large infrastructure contractors. It does not survive contact with a tender that is decided on price per tonne.

Two strong powers, one moderate, four absent. That is a real moat, and it is a cost moat exclusively. Every power Conch possesses helps it produce more cheaply. None helps it sell for more.

Porter's Five Forces

Rivalry — Extreme. Structural overcapacity, a homogeneous product, high fixed costs, and a defecting supply-discipline regime. Utilisation near 48% means roughly half the industry's assets are idle at any moment, and idle assets with debt service are the most dangerous competitors in commodities.⁴

Buyer power — High. Large state contractors and developers buy on landed price, and in a deflating market they know exactly how desperate the seller is.

Supplier power — Low to moderate. Conch owns its limestone and generates a slice of its own power, which is the whole point. But it buys thermal coal on the open market, and coal prices rose 13.25% in the first half of 2026 while cement prices fell — a reminder that the input hedge is partial, not complete.⁴

Threat of substitutes — Low. There is no scaled substitute for Portland cement in mass structural construction. Geopolymers, mass timber and low-clinker blends are real technologies with real niches and no capacity to displace billions of tonnes.

Threat of new entrants — Very low. The prohibition on net new clinker capacity, tightened further in the 2025–2026 building materials work plan, makes entry effectively impossible.²⁹

The uncomfortable synthesis: four of the five forces are favourable, and the one that is not — rivalry — is severe enough to overwhelm the other four. Cement is the classic case of an industry with high barriers to entry and no barriers to exit-avoidance. Nobody new comes in; nobody existing leaves either, because a written-down kiln with sunk capital will produce at any price above cash cost. That is the trap.

Why Conch wins from here — the bull case, with the evidence

One: it survives the shakeout, and the shakeout is being organised. The evidence for Conch's survival is not speculative. It expanded margin in 2025 while the industry lost money, held volume within 1.1% while national output fell, and did not issue the kind of profit warning that peers did.¹⁹ Meanwhile the policy environment is turning against the defectors: the 2025–2026 building materials stabilisation plan places capacity governance at its core, targets below-cost dumping explicitly, and requires firms whose actual output exceeds registered capacity — a widespread abuse running 20–40% at some producers — to file capacity replacement plans.²⁹¹¹ If registered-capacity enforcement actually bites in 2026–2027, the marginal defector loses the ability to overproduce, and the lowest-cost producer is the first to benefit.

Two: the cost gap is measured, not asserted. RMB 64 of gross profit per tonne at an average selling price of RMB 230 in a year the industry described as brutal is a hard number.¹

Three: the payout is now contractual in spirit. A stated floor of 50% of net profit returned annually through 2027, delivered at 55.29% in 2025, converts a cash hoard critique into an income proposition.¹⁴¹

Why it may not — the bear case, with the mechanism

One: the denominator keeps shrinking, and there is no policy fix for demography. Cost leadership determines your share of a pool. It does not determine the size of the pool. With residential construction structurally impaired and infrastructure now also contracting, the plausible path is a domestic market well below 1.6 billion tonnes with no recovery catalyst.⁴ Being the best operator in a market that halves is not a thesis; it is a consolation.

Two: carbon compliance is arriving, and cement is uniquely exposed. In March 2025 the State Council approved, and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment released, the plan expanding China's national emissions trading scheme to cover cement, steel and aluminium.³⁰³¹ Roughly 3,700 entities and 3 billion tonnes of allowances entered the system, lifting national ETS coverage from about 40% to 60% of China's CO2.³⁰ The 2024–2026 phase is deliberately gentle — familiarisation and data quality — with tightening scheduled from 2027.³⁰ The mechanism matters for cement more than for almost any other sector, because roughly 60% of cement's emissions are process emissions from the chemical decomposition of limestone, not from fuel. You cannot abate them by switching energy source. They are intrinsic to the chemistry. When allocation tightens after 2027, that becomes a direct per-tonne cost with no easy engineering answer, and it lands on a product already selling below RMB 230 per tonne.

Three: the cost lever has finite travel. An 11% unit cost reduction cannot be repeated annually. The first quarter of 2026 already showed the arithmetic breaking down — margin compressed despite continued cost work, because the price decline was larger.⁸¹⁶

Four: the activist critique remains unanswered on the capital side. A large pool of financial assets earning near-deposit returns, a legacy equity portfolio accumulated at the peak, no meaningful management equity ownership, no contestable control, and a governance record that includes a criminally convicted former chairman.²²²⁵²⁶ These do not make the business bad. They do mean minority shareholders should discount any assumption that capital will be allocated to maximise their returns specifically.

The three KPIs### Myth versus reality

Three consensus narratives are worth checking against the record before anyone builds a view.

Myth: "Conch controls pricing in East China." Reality: it controls its own cost, and cost rank is not price. Realised price per tonne fell RMB 32 year on year in the first quarter of 2026 on volumes down 9%, in Conch's core geography.⁸ The company is a price taker with an unusually comfortable seat.

Myth: "The cash pile is a war chest for consolidation." Reality: it has been characterised as a war chest for several years, during which the actual deployments have been sub-RMB 350 million bolt-ons resolving related-party overlaps and a legacy portfolio of minority stakes in listed peers accumulated near the 2021 peak.¹⁶²⁵²⁶ The war chest thesis requires the war to start. If capacity governance genuinely forces closures in 2026–2027, it may. That is a hypothesis, not a track record.

Myth: "Diversification is de-risking the business." Reality: aggregates revenue and margin both fell in 2025, concrete is the lowest-margin and highest-credit-risk segment, and overseas remains around 7% of revenue after a decade.¹ Diversification is happening; de-risking, on the numbers, is not yet.

Everything above collapses into a small number of observable quantities. Track these; ignore almost everything else.

1. Gross profit per tonne of self-produced cement and clinker (RMB/tonne). This is the single cleanest expression of Conch's competitive position, because it nets pricing and cost into one number. It was roughly RMB 64 in 2025.¹ It sat far higher in the boom years and it is under pressure in 2026 as realised prices fall.⁸ If it stabilises or recovers while national output keeps falling, the cost-survivor thesis is working. If it grinds lower while volumes hold, Conch is buying share with margin and the moat is narrower than the bulls believe.

2. East China capacity utilisation and peak-shifting compliance. The industry-level variable that sets the price. Clinker utilisation ran near 48% nationally in the first half of 2026.⁴ Cement is a fixed-cost business where the marginal seller sets the price, so the question is not what Conch does but whether enough capacity is genuinely idled — and whether the new registered-capacity enforcement changes defector behaviour.²⁹ Without utilisation recovering meaningfully, no amount of operational excellence produces pricing.

3. Non-cement gross profit as a share of group gross profit. Not revenue — gross profit, and in absolute RMB. Aggregates, concrete and overseas combined need to grow their profit contribution in absolute terms while cement's falls, or the diversification story is decoration. On 2025 evidence, aggregates revenue and margin both went backwards while overseas grew from a small base.¹ This is the number that tells you whether 一基五业 is a strategy or a slide.

The story of Anhui Conch is, in the end, a story about the limits of being excellent. The company did almost everything a heavy industrial operator can do right: it adopted the best technology early, it read a river as a distribution network before anyone else, it refused to lever up in a boom, and it ground its unit costs down through a downturn that put much of its industry into losses. All of that is true and demonstrable in the filings.

And it may still not be enough, because the one variable that determines the outcome — how much concrete China pours in 2030 — is not a variable Conch controls, or can influence, or has any advantage in forecasting. The investment question is not whether Conch is the best cement company in China. It plainly is. The question is what the best cement company in a permanently smaller China is worth.

References

1. 2026目标2.6亿吨！海螺水泥年报解读 — 水泥网 / 新浪财经, 2026-03-26 ↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

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3. 海螺水泥(00914.HK)年度股东应占净利润同比增5.12%至84.64亿元 末期息0.61元 — 新浪财经, 2026-03-25 ↩↩↩↩↩↩

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9. West China Cement expects 45-50% profit fall in 1H26 — International Cement Review (Cemnet) ↩↩

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15. Anhui Conch reports 25% drop in net profit in 2024 — International Cement Review (Cemnet) ↩↩

16. 一季度营收净利双降，海螺水泥6.19亿元收购同业资产，2026年内计划百亿元资本开支 — 腾讯新闻, 2026-07-08 ↩↩↩↩↩↩

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18. 2025年砂石行业，既是阵痛，也是重生！ — 中国砂石协会 ↩

19. 11 lines! Clinker production capacity of 16.5 million tons! Overseas Expansion of Conch Cement — China Cement Network (ccement) ↩

20. 水泥巨头豪掷50亿投资新能源 高耗能产业抢抓"双碳密钥" — 21世纪经济报道, 2022-03-10 ↩

21. 水泥业减排压力大！海螺水泥斥资50亿进军光伏 — 澎湃新闻 ↩

22. 海螺水泥前董事长被判11年，任内"水泥茅"是个"投资狂"？ — 界面新闻 ↩↩↩

23. Announcement Regarding Change of General Manager — Anhui Conch Cement / HKEXnews, 2025-08-11 ↩↩↩

24. Yu Shui appointed as General Manager of Anhui Conch Cement — Global Cement ↩

25. 海螺水泥A股再觅优质标的，举牌亚泰集团 — 21世纪经济报道, 2021-10-15 ↩↩↩

26. 水泥行业掀整合浪潮：海螺水泥二级市场并购冲锋 17.6亿定增入股西部建设 — 21世纪经济报道, 2021-12-23 ↩↩↩

27. 安徽海螺水泥股份有限公司 2025 年度报告摘要 — 巨潮资讯网 (cninfo), 2026-03-25 ↩

28. 安徽海螺水泥股份有限公司 2025 年中期业绩公告 — 巨潮资讯网 (cninfo), 2025-08-27 ↩

29. 反内卷、稳增长、强自律成水泥行业共识——《建材行业稳增长工作方案（2025—2026年）》系列解读之二 — 中国建筑材料联合会, 2025-09-26 ↩↩↩

30. China officially expands national ETS to cement, steel and aluminum sectors — International Carbon Action Partnership ↩↩↩

31. Explainer: China's carbon market to cover steel, aluminium and cement — Carbon Brief ↩