Performance of the Indian Cement Industry: The Competitive Landscape

The cement industry is experiencing a boom on account of the overall growth of the Indian economy primarily because of increased industrial activity, flourishing real estate business, growing construction activity, and expanding investment in the infrastructure sector. The performance of the industry, under different policy regimes, truly establishes that decontrol of the industry and liberalization of the economy has led to remarkable improvement in the indicators such as installed capacity, capacity utilization, per capita consumption and exports. Positive trends can be evidenced in some of the other indicators too namely technology, prices and regional and market concentration. The competitiveness among the firms in the Indian cement industry has also been evaluated for the year 2006-2007. Out of the sample of 17 firms (90.21 per cent of the market share), about 47 per cent have recorded above industry average performance in the overall competitiveness index. The marginal difference between the indices of competitiveness of different firms reveals the tough competition among the firms in the industry.