A Mexican cement company has relocated its U.S. headquarters to Lowry.
Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua, or GCC, is consolidating executives based in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and South Dakota at Lowry’s Rampart Campus office complex, redeveloped by Coughlin and Co.
“We’ve been growing in the U.S. market, and our plans are to continue doing so,” said Enrique Escalante, the company’s president and chief executive. “We do business from El Paso, Texas, almost to Canada. Denver came out ahead because it’s central to all our current operations, and there’s a good airport with nonstop flights.”
Escalante expects to have a total of 20 employees by next year.
The company is leasing about 9,000 square feet in the complex, which totals about 90,000 square feet in two buildings and a hangar. The campus, originally home to the U.S. Air Force aerial photography school, is nearly 100 percent leased, said Hilarie Portell, a spokeswoman for the Lowry Redevelopment Authority. Tenants include Netflix, which leases the hangar for its distribution center, and several health care providers, including Colorado Allergy and Asthma Centers, Family Medicine at Lowry and Denver Nephrology.
GCC, which acquired its first U.S. cement plant in 1994, has $760 million in U.S. assets and 1,060 employees in eight states.
It owns three cement plants, including a $225 million plant under construction in Pueblo that is expected to be completed next fall, a coal mine in Durango and 45 ready-mix concrete plants.
It also owns nine distribution terminals, including two in the Denver metropolitan area. It’s planning a multimillion-dollar expansion of its Commerce City distribution terminal to handle the higher volume of cement the Pueblo plant will generate.
About 85 percent of the cement plants operating in the United States are owned by foreign companies, said Ed Sullivan, chief economist of the Portland Cement Association in Skokie, Ill., a national trade group.
“The industry, even though it’s 85 percent foreign-owned, is very committed to the U.S. market,” Sullivan said. “We’re in the biggest investment phase in the history of the industry. We’re putting about $5 billion in planned expansion throughout the U.S.”
Because Denver isn’t a seaport, it’s more difficult to lure foreign companies to the region, said Tom Clark, executive vice president of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp.
“In a global economy, having established racial and ethnic business communities is a good thing for us,” Clark said. “Companies that want to locate here want to make sure there is racial and ethnic diversity.”
Staff writer Margaret Jackson can be reached at 303-954-1473 or mjackson@denverpost.com.
