CEMENTOS CONCEPCIÓN S.A.E. (CECON)

What it is

Cementos Concepción is a Paraguayan company dedicated to the production and sale of limestone and its derivatives — cement, concrete, and agricultural lime — created in 2018 through the purchase of Calera Risso S.A., owner of a quarry in the department of Concepción. The site covers roughly 1,500 hectares, of which the quarry occupies 300 hectares estimated to contain 360 million tonnes of limestone — enough for more than 100 years of production.

The company operates three business lines: a cement plant, a ready-mix concrete division, and an agricultural lime unit. Its industrial plant in San Lázaro, Concepción, is designed to produce around 20 million bags of cement a year, making CECON the largest cement producer in Paraguay by installed capacity, equipped with what the company describes as state-of-the-art technology.

Who owns it

Control passed in February 2023 from former Paraguayan president Horacio Cartes to his three children — Juan Pablo, Sofía, and María Sol Cartes Montaña — who received the shares as an advance on inheritance, in equal thirds, and went on to inject roughly Gs. 360 billion (≈ USD 50 million) of new capital in June 2023, bringing their direct and indirect stake to 92.5% of the company.

The remaining roughly 7.5% is held by Jiménez Gaona y Lima S.A.E., a minority shareholder.

The ownership transfer came after the company worked through the consequences of US sanctions-related statements made by the US Embassy regarding Horacio Cartes, which had triggered a negative rating watch on CECON’s bonds. The watch was removed once the company demonstrated it had secured operational continuity, additional liquidity, and renewed access to financial markets.

Who runs it

Sofía Cartes Montaña serves as Board President (Presidenta), and Marco Antonio Laterra Uliambre is the registered senior executive responsible for administration and finance (Encargado), as listed with the Superintendencia de Valores (SIV) of the Banco Central del Paraguay. Jorge Méndez Cuevas has served as general manager (Gerente General) and board member.

Not published: the full current board composition and any changes to the general management after mid-2024 were not disclosed in the BVPASA filings or SIV portal pages reviewed; Paraguayan securities regulations (Resolución SV) require periodic disclosure but the most recent filings did not render executive-level detail beyond the above.

The money, in plain words

The whole project cost roughly USD 290 million to build, financed 80% with debt and 20% with owners’ own money — an unusually high-leverage structure, even for a capital-intensive industry. At its peak in late 2022, total financial debt reached USD 267 million; by June 2023, after the capital injection from the new controlling shareholders, that had been reduced to USD 227 million.

FIX SCR (the local affiliate of Fitch Ratings) estimates that, with the plant reaching roughly 90% of capacity and cement priced at around USD 115 per tonne, CECON should generate annual revenues in the range of USD 125 million and an operating cash surplus of around USD 30 million — an operating margin of about 24% — broadly in line with international cement peers. These are forward projections, not audited results: Not published: audited revenue, net profit, and net margin for FY2023 and FY2024 were not publicly available on the BVPASA filings page, the SIV regulator portal (siv.bcp.gov.py), or in any publicly accessible annual report or memoria anual at the time of writing, despite Paraguay’s Resolución SV N° 0022/2024 requiring periodic financial disclosure from listed issuers.

What the audited pre-plant numbers do show: FY2021 revenues, when CECON was still importing cement and building its plant, were Gs. 180,621 million (≈ USD 29.8M at then-prevailing rates), up from Gs.

75,146 million in FY2020 — a doubling in one year, driven by growing concrete and lime sales ahead of the main plant opening. Both years still ran at a cash-flow loss because the heavy plant investment had not yet started generating cement revenue.

What it is doing now

CECON recently announced the early full redemption of the bonds in Series 2 and 3 of its USD3 global bond programme, issued through the BVPASA. To refinance these, the company’s board approved a new USD4 bond programme in August 2025, raising up to USD 5 million, with proceeds dedicated entirely to repaying those maturing obligations.

The move signals a steady, if gradual, deleveraging path — paying off old bonds rather than adding new ones.

The Paraguayan Congress has approved credits to upgrade Route PY22, the road linking Concepción to San Lázaro, which passes CECON’s plant — a piece of public infrastructure that directly reduces the company’s logistics costs and improves its competitive reach.

What to watch

• Debt reduction pace. FIX expects leverage to remain elevated for the near term, with gradual deleveraging from 2024 as the plant generates more operating cash. The key number to track: how fast total debt (still above USD 200 million) falls relative to annual earnings — what analysts call the net debt-to-EBITDA ratio. FIX’s upgrade threshold is below 4.0× on a sustained basis.
• Capacity utilisation. CECON entered a market where the two incumbent producers were already running flat out and some demand was still being met by imports; how quickly CECON fills its own production lines determines how fast revenue grows toward the USD 125 million projection.
• Ownership and governance. FIX notes a strong reputational and economic link between CECON and the Cartes Montaña siblings — any change in that family’s broader situation has historically moved CECON’s credit outlook. The US OFAC sanctions history remains a background risk for the group.
• Financial transparency. CECON has not published audited annual financial statements in a publicly accessible format since FY2021. If the company begins releasing full annual results, investors would gain a clearer read on actual margins, actual debt reduction, and actual return on the USD 290 million investment.

This is news, not investment advice.