Cementos Concepción S.A.E.

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What it is

CECON is a Paraguayan company dedicated to mining, processing and selling limestone and its products; it sits on a 1,500-hectare site in the Concepción department, with a quarry estimated to hold 360 million tonnes of limestone — enough raw material for well over a century of production.

The business runs three units: a cement plant, a ready-mix concrete operation, and an agricultural lime division. According to the company’s own website, the total investment now stands at USD 350 million, and the plant can produce 20 million bags of cement a year — making it, by capacity, Paraguay’s largest.

CECON entered a market where the two established producers were already running flat-out, and unmet demand was being plugged by imports — a structural gap the company was built to fill.

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Who owns it

CECON’s shares were transferred by Horacio Manuel Cartes Jara to his children Juan Pablo Cartes Montaña, Sofía Cartes Montaña and María Sol Cartes Montaña — equally, as an advance on inheritance — in February 2023. Following a capital injection of Gs.

360,000 million (about USD 50 million) in June 2023, the three siblings collectively control 92.5% of the company’s shares.

The trigger for the ownership change was serious: the U.S. Treasury’s OFAC sanctions office targeted Horacio Cartes personally, and the rating agency FIX noted strong reputational and financial links between CECON and its controlling shareholders, Juan Pablo, Sofía and María Sol Cartes Montaña. The Cartes group is Paraguay’s largest business conglomerate, with interests spanning tobacco, beverages, banking, hotels, fuel distribution, media and football.

CECON itself was not sanctioned, and the rating was subsequently restored to stable.

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Who runs it

The Superintendencia de Valores (Paraguay’s securities regulator) lists Sofía Cartes Montaña as President of the board, with Marco Antonio Laterra Uliambre as the registered company officer (Encargado).

Jorge Méndez Cuevas serves as General Manager (gerente general) and sits on the board of directors. The company’s management team includes executives with prior careers at both of Paraguay’s incumbent cement producers — Yguazú Cementos and the state-owned Industria Nacional del Cemento — bringing operational knowledge of the very market they are disrupting.

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The money, in plain words

CECON is not yet a mature profit machine — it is a heavily leveraged infrastructure project that has recently crossed from builder to operator. The project was financed 80% with debt; peak borrowing reached around USD 280 million in 2022.

By June 2023, the capital injection of Gs. 360,000 million (≈USD 50 million) was applied entirely to debt reduction, bringing total financial debt down to USD 227 million from USD 267 million at year-end 2022.

Once running at 90% of its capacity and at a cement price of around USD 115 per tonne, the rating agency FIX projects annual revenues of approximately USD 125 million, with an operating surplus of around USD 30 million — an operating margin of about 24%, in line with international cement peers. Full audited revenue and net profit figures for FY2023 and FY2024 are not disclosed in publicly available sources.

The bonds carry a credit rating of AA-py / pyAA- from FIX (a Fitch affiliate), confirmed in August 2023 with Stable outlook — the second-highest rating category in Paraguay’s local scale, signalling very low default risk on a standalone local-market basis. For a bond investor, that is meaningful; for an equity investor, there is no listed equity to buy.

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What it is doing now

The most recent material move is a deliberate shrinkage of its bond programme. In August 2025, CECON’s board resolved to redeem early — at par plus accrued interest on 4 November 2025 — two dollar-denominated bond series (Series 2 and Series 3 of the USD3 programme), totalling USD 5 million.

At the same time, CECON registered a new bond programme (USD4, USD 5 million) on the Bolsa de Valores de Asunción in late 2025, with the stated purpose of refinancing the same liabilities — rolling shorter-dated debt into new terms rather than paying it down outright. On the operational side, the company is expanding into public-works contracts, including urban road paving, positioning itself as a supplier to both private construction and government infrastructure programmes.

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What to watch

• Capacity ramp-up speed. Projections assume 90% plant utilisation; actual utilisation data is not publicly disclosed. The gap between rated capacity and real throughput is the single biggest driver of whether debt ratios improve on schedule.
• Debt trajectory. With USD 227 million of financial debt and no equity market to raise capital, every percentage point of operating margin matters. FIX’s threshold for a rating upgrade is a debt-to-operating-surplus ratio below 4×; the company has not yet publicly confirmed it has crossed that line.
• OFAC overhang. The sanctions on Horacio Cartes personally remain in force; the company filed a formal regulatory disclosure regarding statements made by the U.S. Embassy. Ongoing reputational scrutiny of the controlling family could affect access to international financing or partnerships.
• Market structure. Paraguay’s cement market is growing at roughly 4% a year. The two incumbents are already at full capacity, so CECON does not need to steal share — it needs to absorb the surplus demand. If the economy slows, that cushion narrows.
• Transparency. CECON files with BVPASA and the Superintendencia de Valores but does not publish full audited financial statements in open-access format. Investors who want actual revenue and profit figures must rely on the rating agency reports or pay for third-party data.

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This is news, not investment advice.