Four cement platforms took four different routes out of the same market. Two of the transactions this brief called pending have since closed, and one of them changed who owns Türkiye's largest coastal export platform.
If you buy cement or clinker from Türkiye, the counterparty map has changed. Heidelberg Materials completed its move from 39.72% to 79.44% of Akçansa on 18 June 2026, so a German major now controls a Turkish platform with five cement terminals across five seaports. Çimsa took Mannok in Ireland to 100% in May 2026. Both were open items when this brief was published on 25 May.
The wider read holds. Türkiye's cement sector is not retreating from export under carbon rules — OYAK Çimento's exports rose 28% year on year again in the second quarter of 2026, and Medcem is still shipping Turkish clinker into its own foreign mills. What is being contested is control of the margin stack in the destination market: plants, grinding capacity, terminals and port access. On the carbon side, the arithmetic most people quote is the 2034 arithmetic. In 2026 the free-allocation adjustment leaves roughly €1.26 of the €50-per-tonne default-versus-actual gap actually payable.
Note on dates. This page was first published as a LinkedIn brief on 25 May 2026 (revised 28 May) and was re-checked against published data on 7 August 2026. Two transactions have closed since publication, one legal citation has been replaced, and the CBAM certificate price has moved to a new quarter. Each figure below carries its own date.
Three of the open items in the original brief now have answers, and one has moved without closing.
| Open item at publication | Position as at 7 August 2026 | Source date |
|---|---|---|
| Heidelberg Materials to 79.44% of Akçansa — accepted 20 April 2026, subject to regulatory approvals | Completed 18 June 2026. Heidelberg Materials holds the majority; Sabancı has exited majority control | Heidelberg Materials Q2 2026 statement, 30 July 2026 |
| Çimsa Ireland to acquire the remaining 5.3% of Mannok for €20.48M | Completed May 2026 for €20.5M in cash. Mannok is wholly owned. Confirmed on the wire, not only in a KAP aggregation | Reuters, 27 May 2026 |
| Medcem Florida (Port Manatee) grinding mill, “3Q26 commencement” | Commissioning and testing scheduled for August 2026, commercial production from September 2026, one of two lines initially. Full 450,000–500,000 t/yr when both run; ramp through 2027 | S&P Global, 13 April 2026 |
| Medcem Bassens (France) terminal, 16,000 t, “3Q26 commencement” | Not confirmed. Medcem's French subsidiary Novada Cement France does describe a cement import terminal at Bassens/Bordeaux, but we have found no published commencement date | ICR, June 2026; company material, 2026 |
The four platforms are Çimsa, Medcem, OYAK Çimento and Akçansa. They are not a representative sample of the Turkish sector; they are the large Turkish-linked platforms that made a structural international move between 2024 and 2026. Limak's Africa assets sit outside the window (Mozambique 2016, Ivory Coast 2018), and in this pass we found no comparable move by Nuh Çimento, Göltaş, Konya Çimento, Aşkale or KÇS.
Çimsa, the building-materials arm of Sabancı Holding, bought the Buñol white cement plant in Valencia in 2021, then 94.7% of Mannok Holdings DAC in Ireland — an enterprise value of about €330M for 100% — closing on 2 October 2024. In May 2026 Çimsa Ireland bought the remaining 5.3% from Mannok's local leadership for €20.5M in cash. Mannok is now wholly owned.
In the United States, Çimsa Americas Cement Manufacturing and Sales Corporation completed an USD 82M grey-cement grinding plant in Houston on 14 October 2025, with 600,000 tonnes a year of grinding capacity alongside an existing 300,000 t/yr white cement grinding plant. This is grinding capacity, not integrated production: clinker is imported and ground locally into finished cement.
Çimsa's stated objective after the Mannok completion is 70% of revenue in foreign currency. What that pattern buys is the finishing and selling step in the market where the customer sits.
Medcem, Eren Holding's cement business since 2015, has built a port-led distribution network rather than buying plants. Its Mersin clinker base sits 13 km from Medcem Port, which can load four Panamax vessels at once at 22 metres draught. Fly ash for blending comes from Eren's 2,790 MW Zonguldak coal-fired assets through Eren Port on the Black Sea, so the supplementary cementitious material stream is inside the group rather than bought in.
Medcem Global lists six operating terminals — Antwerp, Trieste, Sheerness, Glasgow, Liverpool and Mağusa — with Bassens in France under construction. The first Antwerp discharge was 20,000 tonnes of CEM I 52.5 N in December 2025; Trieste took a first vessel of about 7,000 tonnes in January 2026. Medcem told S&P Global it expects 70,000–100,000 tonnes into Antwerp and 60,000–80,000 tonnes into Trieste across 2026.
Three grinding mills sit outside Türkiye: Gabes in Tunisia at 500,000 tonnes a year, Douala in Cameroon at 400,000, and Port Manatee in Florida. The Florida mill is the near-term item. Construction began in February 2025; commissioning and testing were scheduled for August 2026 with commercial production from September, running one of two lines at first and reaching 450,000–500,000 t/yr when both are operating, with the ramp continuing through 2027. Clinker for it comes from Türkiye.
OYAK was the Turkish-controlled vehicle for international cement consolidation, holding Cimpor from January 2019. In March 2024 Taiwan Cement Corporation completed the purchase of OYAK's remaining 60% of Cimpor Portugal for €480M, taking Cimpor to 100% TCC ownership. The same transaction moved 20% of OYAK Çimento to TCC, giving TCC 60% of the Turkish cement joint venture.
That is a control shift rather than a retreat, and the export line since then supports the distinction. OYAK Çimento reported export volumes up 28% year on year in the first quarter of 2026 and again in the second, with exports at 10% of sales in Q2 and first-half revenue of TL 27 billion on EBITDA of TL 6.6 billion.
Heidelberg Materials announced on 20 April 2026 that it had accepted to acquire Sabancı Holding's 39.72% of Akçansa, taking its own holding from 39.72% to 79.44%. The transaction was subject to regulatory approvals at the time this brief was written. It completed on 18 June 2026.
The asset base is three cement plants, 26 ready-mixed concrete plants, five aggregates quarries and five cement terminals across five seaports in the Marmara, Aegean and Black Sea regions. In its own announcement Heidelberg framed the purchase around allocating volumes between the domestic market and export destinations including the Mediterranean basin, the Black Sea region and the East Coast of the United States.
This is the mirror of the Çimsa pattern. Instead of a Turkish group buying assets abroad, a foreign group has bought a Turkish platform for its export optionality. Sabancı sits on both sides of it: expanding through Çimsa, exiting majority control of Akçansa.
| Platform | Destination-market asset | Control shift | Commercial mechanism |
|---|---|---|---|
| Çimsa | Ireland, Spain, US grinding | Turkish outbound control | Acquisition plus local finishing |
| Medcem | EU/UK terminals, Africa and US mills | Turkish downstream control | Terminal and grinding margin stack |
| OYAK Çimento | Cimpor control sold to TCC | Deconsolidation | Control ceded, exports continue |
| Akçansa | Export seaport network in Türkiye | Foreign majority, completed 18 June 2026 | Foreign major buys Türkiye export optionality |
Türkiye supplied 42.9% of EU27 cement and clinker imports in 2025, against total imports of 14.2 Mt, on Cement Europe's Eurostat-based trade report published in April 2026. That is the exposure base, and it is a 2025 reading.
Three things about the carbon arithmetic have moved since 25 May, and all three matter more than the headline.
The Commission publishes a CBAM certificate price each quarter, and each quarterly price applies to goods imported during that quarter. The Q1 2026 price was €75.36 per tonne of CO₂e. The Q2 2026 price is €75.28. The Q3 2026 price had not been published as at 7 August 2026. Any model built on €75.36 is quoting the first quarter.
The original brief cited Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2621 for the EU default value on grey clinker. That citation no longer holds. Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1740 of 20 July 2026, published in the Official Journal on 31 July 2026 and applying from 1 January 2026, replaces Annex I and Annex IV of 2025/2621 in full. The replacement removes the pre-calculated marked-up columns and states the mark-up as a rule in the Annex instead: 10% for 2026, 20% for 2027, 30% from 2028, applied to cement, iron and steel, aluminium and hydrogen, with 1% for fertilisers. It also moves cement and clinker to ten-digit TARIC codes so that grey and white products no longer share a code.
A citation to a marked-up default column is now a citation to something that has been deleted. If you are modelling this, go to the replaced Annex and confirm whether the figure you are using is a base value or a value that already includes the year's mark-up. We have not been able to settle that question for grey clinker from the published summaries as at 7 August 2026, so we are carrying the 1.551 figure below as an industry-body reading with its date attached rather than as a current legal citation.
TÜRKÇİMENTO said in March 2026 that its members' declared actual emissions for grey cement clinker run at about 0.88 tCO₂ per tonne against an EU default of 1.551 applied to Türkiye, which has no country-specific default value and falls into the residual category. On the Q2 2026 certificate price that difference is about €50.5 per tonne of clinker, gross.
That is not the 2026 bill. In 2026 the certificates an importer surrenders are calculated on full embedded emissions and then reduced by a free-allocation adjustment — the CBAM factor — set at 97.5% for 2026 under Article 10a(1a) of Directive 2003/87/EC. The factor is a credit against the obligation, not a discount on the certificate price. The practical effect is that roughly 2.5% of the embedded emissions carries a charge this year, so a €50.5 gross gap is about €1.26 per tonne of clinker in 2026. The factor falls to 95% in 2027, 90% in 2028, and to zero by 2034 — at which point the same gap is the full €50.
Two consequences follow for a commercial conversation. The near-term case for verified actual emissions is not the 2026 saving; it is that the verification file takes time to build and the charge scales fast after 2028. And an exporter who cannot produce verified data will be priced on a default that sits roughly 76% above what the industry says it actually emits. The mechanics for the wider exporter case are on our CBAM page.
CBAM covers both cement and clinker — HS 2523 10 00 for clinker and 2523 21/29/30/90 for Portland and other hydraulic cements, under Annex I of Regulation (EU) 2023/956. Grinding Turkish clinker inside the EU does not remove the exposure; it moves the border-charge event from finished cement to imported clinker. EU grinding still buys customer proximity, blending flexibility, freight economics per final customer and local sales channels — but it is not a way around the mechanism.
For the US moves — Çimsa Houston, Medcem Florida — there is no CBAM driver at all. The United States does not operate an equivalent federal border-carbon regime. Those decisions are about market access, distribution, currency mix and proximity to the customer.
Your Turkish counterparty list has changed at the top. A German major now controls Akçansa's five seaport terminals, and the stated plan is to move volumes between the domestic market and export destinations as conditions change. That is useful if you value delivery reliability across a group balance sheet, and it is worth watching if you were relying on the previous ownership for pricing behaviour. Separately, ask each supplier for verified emissions data now rather than in 2028, because the file is the slow part.
Four platforms took four routes and none of them is obviously the answer. What the four have in common is that each bought a step closer to the end customer — a plant, a mill, a terminal, or in Akçansa's case a buyer who already owns the destination network. The question worth asking is which step in your own chain is currently priced by someone else, not which of the four models to copy.
The terminal and grinding build-out is a procurement pipeline: mills, silos, ship unloaders, bagging lines, blending plant and port handling. Medcem alone has six operating terminals, one under construction and two mills ramping. Qualification onto those vendor lists is an administrative sequence, and it can be worked before the next site is announced — the mechanics are on our supplier qualification page.
Yes. Heidelberg Materials announced on 20 April 2026 that it had accepted to buy Sabancı Holding's 39.72% of Akçansa, raising its own stake from 39.72% to 79.44%, subject to regulatory approvals. The transaction completed on 18 June 2026 and was confirmed in Heidelberg Materials' second-quarter statement on 30 July 2026. Akçansa's three cement plants, 26 ready-mixed concrete plants, five quarries and five seaport terminals now sit under a German-majority owner.
Less than the headline gap, because 2026 is the first year of the phase-in. TÜRKÇİMENTO puts members' declared grey-clinker emissions at about 0.88 tCO₂ per tonne against a 1.551 default (March 2026). At the Q2 2026 certificate price of €75.28 that is a gross difference of about €50.5 per tonne. In 2026 the surrender obligation is reduced by a free-allocation adjustment of 97.5%, so roughly €1.26 per tonne is actually payable. The adjustment falls to 95% in 2027, 90% in 2028, and to nothing by 2034, when the full gap applies.
No. CBAM covers clinker as well as finished cement under Annex I of Regulation (EU) 2023/956. Grinding inside the EU moves the charge from the imported cement to the imported clinker rather than removing it. EU grinding can still be the right commercial decision — proximity to the customer, blending flexibility, freight per final delivery, local sales channels and standards conformance — but it should not be sold internally as a carbon workaround. For the US mills at Houston and Port Manatee there is no CBAM driver at all, because the United States has no equivalent federal regime.
Türkiye accounted for 42.9% of EU27 cement and clinker imports in 2025, against total EU27 imports of 14.2 Mt, on Cement Europe's Eurostat-based full-year trade report published in April 2026. That implies roughly 6.1 Mt of Turkish-origin volume. It is a 2025 reading; the 2026 print is what the disconfirmation test above turns on.
Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1740 of 20 July 2026, published in the Official Journal on 31 July 2026, in force from 3 August 2026 and applying from 1 January 2026. It replaces Annex I and Annex IV of Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2621 in full, deletes the pre-calculated marked-up default columns, and states the mark-up as a rule instead — 10% for 2026, 20% for 2027 and 30% from 2028 for cement, iron and steel, aluminium and hydrogen, and 1% for fertilisers. It also splits grey and white cement and clinker across ten-digit TARIC codes. If your file cites a marked-up column from the earlier Annex, it is citing a table that no longer exists.
If you buy Turkish clinker, the two questions worth asking this quarter are who owns your supplier now and whether they can hand you verified emissions data.
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