Letter from the President and CEO

2023 was characterised by persistent market uncertainty, supply chain disruptions and energy and commodity price corrections resulting from a changing political and geographical situation and widespread socio-economic instability.

Faced with this generalised slowdown, we have recorded good results based on sustainable and profitable growth with increases in sales and profits in most of the regions and businesses in which Cementos Molins operates. This strengthens our business model that integrates products and solutions across our value chain and our geographic diversification.

Specifically, in the 2023 financial year, we achieved a net profit of €151m, 35% higher than in 2022. Income and EBITDA also remained at high levels, at €1,349 billion and €337 million respectively, up 6% and 22%.

We are currently striving to meet the challenges we have set ourselves in our Roadmap 2030 with a focus on decarbonising our business without losing sight of managing environmental, social and governance issues.

We are adapting to the changing global and industry landscape and investing in innovation and digitalisation to increase the efficiency of our operations and the development of products with a smaller carbon footprint. We strive to protect the environment, thinking not only about the environment, but also about people, offering quality employment.

On behalf of the Board of Directors, I would like to express our gratitude to the shareholders, customers and suppliers, stakeholders in general and especially to the more than 6,300 people who are part of Cementos Molins.

I would like to start this new 2023 Integrated Report by thanking all our stakeholders for their ongoing support and their great contribution to our continuous improvement plans.

This year, we renewed our commitment to sustainable growth. To achieve this, we gave new impetus to investing in and developing initiatives to reduce the carbon footprint of the products and solutions we offer. As part of our commitment to energy efficiency, we can highlight the construction of a new photovoltaic plant at our factory in San Luis (Argentina), with a capacity of 22 MW on an area of 49 hectares. This installation supplies 55% of the factory’s total electricity needs. Also noteworthy is the remodelling of the Minas factory in Uruguay, where we have integrated all the industrial, mining and logistics facilities into a single production centre. Among other efficiency improvements, we have achieved a 40% reduction in energy consumption in cement grinding.

At our facilities in Sant Vicenç dels Horts (Spain), and after more than a year of consolidation of the comprehensive transformation project of the buildings and common areas, we achieved energy savings of 1,696Mw-h/year (-67%). In terms of initiatives to foster process optimisation and improve customer service, we have launched a large number of actions, including a new customer service channel in Spain.

We remain committed to the circular economy as a strategic lever for decarbonising our products. This commitment is reflected not only in the use of recycled raw materials and alternative fuels in our plants, but also in increased investment in the recovery and management of third-party waste. Furthermore, our recycling and alternative raw materials plant celebrated its first anniversary, during which we managed to give a second life to more than 75,000 tonnes of waste.

The health and safety of our employees is our key priority. For this reason, we strive to achieve our strategic goal of zero accidents. Despite improving results in the vast majority of our operations, we ended the year slightly below the ambitious targets we had set for 2023, so we will ramp up our efforts to achieve them in 2024.

As we do every year, we have developed numerous Corporate Social Responsibility projects in all the countries where we are present, with a very positive impact on the three main axes of our CSR strategy: protection and development of the natural environment; investment in knowledge and contribution to the development and well-being of communities and people. I believe it is of interest to highlight in this section our investment in the MedForest360 multifunctional forest management project in the Collserola mountain range (Barcelona). This project is based on our stake in Nactiva – the collective platform for the protection and regeneration of the Mediterranean natural capital.

Absolute respect for people’s dignity is at the heart of the company’s culture and is applied in each and every business and location in which we operate. We therefore reaffirm our commitment to respect and foster human rights throughout the value chain; we are prioritising our corporate human rights policies as much as possible and have prepared a new ‘due diligence’ model that will be implemented in 2024. This will allow us to work with foresight to manage potential risks and anticipate new regulations.

Sustainability is at the heart of our corporate strategy and we have been implementing continuous improvement plans for many years. We are entering 2024 with our sights set on new projects that will enable us to disseminate our progress in this area in a fully transparent and informative manner. We have already launched a new dual materiality analysis to cover both dimensions: impact materiality and financial materiality, in order to provide our stakeholders with a complete overview of the most significant issues as we draw up our next report in accordance with the new European CSRD directive.

Finally, I would like to highlight that, in 2023, we successfully completed our latest Strategic Plan. We achieved financial results that comfortably exceed the targets of the Plan and we are very much in line with the sustainability objectives included in the priorities of our 2030 Roadmap. However, we have also been trying to anticipate the future through the intense work of our entire team, which has allowed us to define a new 2024-2026 Strategic Plan. This document will be presented in the first months of 2024 and includes demanding growth targets, as well as a reinforced ambition in terms of sustainability, with a renewed 2030 agenda, new technologies, the launch of products with a smaller carbon footprint and an acceleration of the company’s digitalisation plans.

I would not want to end this letter without renewing the commitment we express on a daily basis to our corporate purpose: we would like to foster social development and people’s quality of life by creating innovative and sustainable building solutions. We strive to improve every day so that the ambition expressed in that purpose becomes a reality. That is why I would like to express my heartfelt thanks for the effort and commitment of the more than 6,300 people who are part of Cementos Molins and who have made it possible for everything that is reflected in this report to become a reality.