Loma Negra

Loma Negra

Alfredo Fortabat founded Loma Negra in 1926 near a namesake black hill in Olavarría, Buenos Aires Province, building it into Argentina's dominant cement and concrete supplier over six decades. His widow, Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat, succeeded him and ran the company until 2005, when she sold a controlling stake to Camargo Corrêa — now InterCement — for $1.025 billion (per The Wall Street Journal, 2005). That transaction transformed a family-controlled industrial patriarch into the Argentine subsidiary of a Brazilian conglomerate. Loma Negra operates across the full cement value chain: limestone extraction, clinker production, grinding, ready-mix concrete, aggregates, and lime. The company sells portland, masonry, and specialty cements to retail hardware stores, contractors, and large-scale infrastructure projects. Confirmed production assets include the L'Amalí and Barker plants in Buenos Aires Province, plus Catamarca and San Juan grinding facilities, giving the firm geographic coverage from the Pampas to the Cuyo region. In 2017, Loma Negra listed American Depositary Shares on the NYSE (ticker: LOMA), raising $954 million in one of the largest Argentine IPOs since the 1990s (per Reuters, 2017). The company employs 5,500 workers and runs eight cement plants with total installed capacity of roughly 14 million metric tons annually, though actual production runs well below that as Argentine construction cycles. In 2023, InterCement announced a restructuring to reduce its debt load, and local Argentine business publication El Cronista reported that Loma Negra's cash flows were integral to those negotiations (per El Cronista, 2023). Subsidiaries include Ferrosur Roca, a freight rail line that moves raw materials and cement between Olavarría and Buenos Aires. Loma Negra is structurally distinct because it is a publicly traded industrial operating company in an asset class — cement — that institutional allocators normally access via global building-materials conglomerates like Holcim or Cemex. The NYSE listing gives foreign institutional investors direct exposure to Argentina's infrastructure spend without requiring private-market access or local brokerage accounts, though the peso-dollar inflation dynamics make it a volatility play as much as a cement bet.