Cemex Venezuela, S.A.C.A. – Tipo I (antes Vencemos)

What it is

Vencemos was founded on 23 September 1943 by a group of Venezuelan entrepreneurs led by industrialist Eugenio Mendoza. It was one of the cornerstones of Mendoza’s industrial empire, which also included the Polar group.

Between 1950 and 1990, Vencemos was one of the most important producers in the Americas, with output reaching one million tonnes of cement a year. In 1994 it became a subsidiary of Mexican multinational Cemex, S.A.B.

de C.V., then the largest cement company in the Americas.

The company operated three cement plants — in Pertigalete (Anzoátegui state), Barquisimeto (Lara state) and Maracaibo (Zulia state) — plus a clinker grinding facility in Ciudad Guayana (Bolívar state). Before nationalisation, Cemex Venezuela held roughly 50% of the domestic market, with installed capacity of 4.6 million tonnes of cement a year.

Who owns it

In April 2008, President Hugo Chávez declared the cement sector strategically vital; a June 2008 decree declared Cemex, Holcim and Lafarge of public utility; and by August 2008 the government had taken over Vencemos’s plants. In 2011 Venezuela agreed to pay Cemex S.A.B.

de C.V. $600 million as compensation for the seized assets.

After the handover, the operating entity was renamed Venezolana de Cementos (Vencemos) and, along with the former Lafarge and Holcim plants, placed under the umbrella of the Corporación Socialista de Cemento (CSC), a state body. The Venezuelan state is the dominant shareholder; the precise current ownership percentage split between state entities and any residual private float is not disclosed in available sources.

Who runs it

The Corporación Socialista de Cemento sits under the Ministry of Industry and National Production, which has operational oversight of the plants. In October 2024, Industry Minister Pedro Rafael Tellechea visited the Pertigalete plant to review operations and evaluate productivity — a signal that political supervision of the plants remains direct and hands-on.

The names of the current managing director, board chair or CFO of the listed entity are not disclosed in available sources; Venezuela does not require state-controlled listed companies to publish board registers in freely accessible form.

The money, in plain words

No revenue, profit or balance-sheet figures for this listed entity are available in any freely accessible source — not on the Bolsa de Valores de Caracas, not via SUNAVAL, and not on the company’s own site. Production volumes and financial results are a mystery; official data on each of the sector’s ten plants has been opaque for more than a decade.

What is known at the industry level: by late 2024, Venezuela’s entire cement sector produced roughly 1.7 million tonnes — about one quarter of what it made a decade earlier. President Maduro pledged at the end of 2024 to double cement output in 2025, without specifying tonnage targets.

What it is doing now

In February 2025, the Ministry of Commerce visited the Pertigalete plant and provided the Vencemos management team with technical training on quality standards and intellectual property, part of a broader push to reinforce industrial compliance. The state cement corporation had targeted 1.5 million tonnes of nationwide output for 2024, a modest ambition compared with historic peaks.

The VCM.1.VE listing on the Bolsa de Valores de Caracas remains active, but trading is thin and the shares function more as a vestigial financial instrument than a live capital-raising vehicle; no new equity has been raised and no dividend has been publicly disclosed since the expropriation.

What to watch

• Transparency: Any financial disclosure — revenue, assets, debt — from the CSC or the listed entity would be the single biggest event for investors tracking this ticker.
• Capacity recovery: Whether Venezuela’s cement plants can regain meaningful output is the operational question; government pledges of 100% capacity utilisation have not been met historically.
• Policy risk: Any shift in Venezuela’s industrial policy — privatisation, joint-venture openings or further currency liberalisation — could revalue the shell company’s listed shares sharply.
• Legal legacy: The $600 million 2011 settlement closed Cemex S.A.B. de C.V.’s direct claims, but Venezuela’s broader expropriation arbitration environment remains unsettled and could affect investor confidence in the Caracas market as a whole.

This is news, not investment advice.