History

In 1884, the year of the beginning of the cement industry in Luxembourg, the company Brasseur, Lambert et Cie built up a cement-plant in Rumelange, in order to produce blast furnace slag cement. This firm merged in 1897 with the newly-created Companie Générale des Ciments. The new entity opened a second grinding plant in Dommeldange.

In the year 1912, Ciments d’Esch was created on the initiative of ARBED. It was the first cement-manufacturer in Luxembourg producing Portland and Portland slag cement. The production line was built near the steel plant of Schifflange.

In 1920 the S.A. des Ciments Luxembourgeois was born from the merger of Ciments d’Esch with the Compagnie Générale des Ciments. Because of a mighty steel-industry, which supplied the company with slag, it was decided to specialise in producing granulated blast furnace slag cement and bricks made of granulated slag. At the beginning, there were just two clinker kilns with a daily production capacity of ca. 150 t of clinker and two small cement mills. The yearly production capacity was 50.000 t of cement. From the very beginning, Matériaux S.A. was responsible for the marketing of the cement. It was the sales company and a branch of the Ciments Luxembourgeois. The constantly increasing consumption of cement over several years induced the S.A. des Ciments Luxembourgeois to extend and modernise the production facilities, partly by building extensions or new buildings which of course required high investments.

Nowadays, the clinker for the plant in Esch is delivered by train from the clinker plant located in the so-called Langengrund in Rumelange.The yearly production capacity attains 1.000.000 t of clinker. This clinker plant, called Intermoselle, controlled already by Ciments Luxembourgeois, was taken over completely on January 1, 2005.

In connection with the closing of the blast furnace production, ARBED sold their participation in Ciments Luxembourgeois to Dyckerhoff AG in Wiesbaden. So Dyckerhoff became majority shareholder, by holding a stake of 98%. Dyckerhoff is the second largest cement manufacturer in Germany, acting in east Europe and USA and owned since 2004 by the Italian Buzzi Unicem group.

In 2007, Ciments Luxembourgeois and Materiaux S.A. merged to become the new company named Cimalux.

In 2010, Cimalux took into service a new cement grinding mill, a vertical roller mill, which is energetically very performant