The author of this report argues that Holcim’s exit from its Indian ventures (Ambuja & ACC) is mainly because it wishes to have a low carbon footprint for the entire group and hence is exiting businesses that have very high carbon intensity. Cement making is certainly one such, and being a hard-to-abate sector, chances that CO2 emissions will decrease in the near future are not high either.
All the same, it does not sound sanguine to assume that a large business group that has operations in over 70 countries and revenues in excess of $25 billion quit a business in order to go low carbon. If this assumption is true and many such environment minded companies quit hard-to-abate businesses, which in turn get taken over by businesses relatively less bothered about their environmental credentials, the hard-to-abate sector becomes even harder to abate!
