Ohorongo Chairman appointed as president to VDZ Board

The Chairman of the Board of Directors of Ohorongo Cement, Gerhard Hirth , has been re-elected as President to the German Cement Works Associations’ (VDZ) new Board of Directors on 8 April 2014 in Berlin.

Gerhard Hirth has been President of the German Cement Works Association since 2005. "I would like to thank our member companies for their support over the previous years and look forward to the pending tasks," said VDZ President Gerhard Hirth after his re-election in Berlin.

After some difficult years for the German cement industry, he takes a positive view and expects the demand for cement to grow in 2014 due to the favourable trend in terms of building permission for both residential and non-residential construction, as already indicated by the good figures from domestic cement deliveries during the first months of the year.

Gerhard Hirth (64), who has a degree in engineering management, began his career in the cement industry in 1976 at Dyckerhoff AG and continued at the Westphalian Anneliese Zement AG. He has managed the SCHWENK Group in Ulm since 2000. He was leading the Namibian Cement Project form the very first moment and has been the Chairman of the Ohorongo Cement Board since the inception of Ohorongo Cement. He is a member of several supervisory and advisory boards of industrial companies both in Germany and abroad, as well as President of the Liaison Committee of the European Cement Industy.

“The appointment of Mr Hirth as President to the VDZ Board, brings a continued wealth of knowledge from the industry to Namibia,” says Mr Hans-Wilhelm Schuette, MD of Ohorongo Cement. “The cement industry is still an infant in Namibia and we have to tap into all possible resources to ensure we continue to grow the industry to become one of the biggest contributors to the Namibian economy,” said Schuette.

The German Cement Works Association is an association of cement manufacturers.

The Association has campaigned for the interests and concerns of German cement manufacturers for more than 135 years.

Currently, 20 German cement manufacturers are full members of the Association which, together with a total of 49 cement works and approx. 7,300 employees, produce around 32 million tons of cement annually and generate a turnover of 2.2 billion euros.