Not every number in this magazine is about what Vietnam sells abroad. Some are about what Vietnam makes too much of at home — and cement is the clearest case. The country can produce far more of it than it can use, and while that's a genuine problem for the cement industry, it quietly works in favour of anyone buying cement-based building products. Worth understanding, even though cement itself isn't on our sourcing menu.

The scale of the surplus

The arithmetic is stark. Vietnam's installed cement capacity exceeds 122 million tonnes a year across roughly 92 production lines — against domestic demand of under 70 million tonnes. That gap left plants running at an average of only about 77% of capacity. It is a textbook overcapacity market: too many kilns, chasing too little demand, built for a construction boom that flattened.

Export was supposed to absorb the excess, and increasingly can't. Cement and clinker exports fell about 5% to 29.7 million tonnes in 2024, and — more tellingly — revenue dropped around 14% to roughly US$1.14 billion as sea freight rose and China, a major buyer, pulled back. The Philippines is now Vietnam's largest cement and clinker export market, and the government has cut the clinker export tax to help drain the surplus. When a state adjusts tax policy to move inventory, the oversupply is real.

Why a cement buyer's problem is a board buyer's tailwind

Cement is not one of our six groups, so why does it belong here? Because it is the input behind one of them. Fiber-cement board — our own DURAGREEN® line and its peers — is made from cement, reinforcing fibre and additives. When domestic cement and clinker are in structural surplus and priced to move, the input cost of cement-based products softens, from boards to concrete goods. A glut at the raw-material end is a tailwind at the finished-product end.

That doesn't translate one-for-one into a lower board price — energy, fibre (the Kuralon PVA that replaced asbestos), labour and freight all matter too — but it removes upward pressure from the single largest raw input, at a time when the tile cluster is telling a similar overcapacity story one material over.

The pattern to take away

This is the third time this year the same shape has appeared: a Vietnamese sector built for a boom, carrying capacity into a cooler market, and turning a producer's surplus into a buyer's leverage — quartz absorbing displaced Chinese volume, tile kilns idling, and now cement kilns at 77%. For a buyer the lesson is consistent: structural overcapacity is where the negotiating power sits. Read the utilisation rate, and buy into the slack.

One honesty note: cement is also an emissions-heavy product, which is exactly why it sits inside the EU's carbon border tax. Cheap domestic cement and a European carbon cost pull in opposite directions — worth holding both facts at once on an EU-bound, cement-based line.

Sources & data notes

Capacity (over 122 million tonnes across ~92 lines), domestic demand (under 70 million tonnes), average utilisation (~77%), 2024 cement and clinker exports (29.7 million tonnes, down ~5%; revenue ~US$1.14 billion, down ~14%), the Philippines as the largest export market, and the clinker export-tax cut are drawn from 2024–2025 Vietnamese cement-industry and trade reporting. Figures are indicative and subject to revision; input-cost effects on finished products are indirect and vary by producer. For orientation only, not a price quote.

Buying fiber-cement board or other cement-based products from Vietnam? Send us one BOM and we'll price it against the current market — input tailwinds and all — within 48 hours. Our own DURAGREEN® line is one of the six groups we consolidate.