On July 23, Chairman Zhang Anping of Taiwan Cement Group was invited to attend the ACPAC conference sponsored by Taiwan Cement Industry Association and delivered a keynote speech to the participating Asian cement industry. Here is the full text:
If human beings suddenly lost social media, civilization would still survive.
If humans suddenly lost cryptocurrency, civilization would still survive.
If human beings lose artificial intelligence, civilization will still exist.
But if the human race loses its concrete tomorrow morning, modern civilization will begin to grind to a halt.
Cities will stop expanding, power systems will not grow, ports will not develop, and data centers will not be built. It
won't be long before the physical world around us starts to crumble.
Yet despite this reality, our industry sometimes acts as if its best days are behind it.
My view is quite the opposite. I believe that the most important chapter of the cement industry has not yet been written.
Cement is the silent skeleton
of civilization. Modern Portland cement is only about two hundred years old. Joseph Aspdin patented it in England in 1824.
Gobekli Tepe is older than it, the Pyramids are older than it, the Great Wall is older than it, and the Roman Pantheon is older than it.
Two hundred years may be old for a man, but it is very young for a technology that has changed civilization. If human civilization is a 70-year-old man, then modern cement is just a two-year-old child, full of curiosity about the world and constantly discovering new possibilities.
Therefore, we should stop thinking of ourselves as an ancient industry that only remembers the good old days.
We should think like a young man who is ready to create tomorrow.
Cement's greatest achievement may also be our biggest problem.
We've become invisible.
When people admire a bridge, they praise the engineer.
When people admire a skyscraper, they praise the architect.
When people praise artificial intelligence, they praise software developers.
No one will take a selfie in front of a cement factory-except maybe the cement factory of Taiwan Cement Corporation. Without cement,
however, none of these achievements would have been possible.
Over the past two hundred years, our mission has been relatively simple.
Human beings need more houses, roads, bridges, ports, factories and cities. We provide the materials that make modern civilization possible. Cement has become the skeleton of civilization's silence.
Smart Producers Create Value, Not Production
Scientists estimate that concrete makes up about 70% of the total mass of human construction. However, it also accounts for about 8% of total current global CO2 emissions.
A thousand years from now, if archaeologists from Mars arrive on Earth, they may conclude that our civilization worships concrete.
They are not entirely wrong. But the question today is not how cement was built, but what cement must become in the future.
For most of the twentieth century, the logic of our industry was size.
Build bigger factories, open bigger mines, build bigger kilns. Reduce cost
by scale and exchange output for benefit. Full load production goes round and round.
This logic used to be extremely effective.
But the future will not only belong to the largest producers. It will belong to the smartest producers – those who use the least energy, are the most innovative, have the smallest carbon footprint, are the most trusted by their communities, and create "value" rather than just "output.". The physical foundation
of the
AI era has been optimized for "scale" for decades.
In the future, the world requires us to optimize for "wisdom" because the world we live in is changing. The
climate is changing, the energy system is changing, cities are changing, the way they are built is changing.
Artificial intelligence is changing the way the world imagines the future. Everyone
says AI is a software revolution. But AI is also an energy revolution and an infrastructure revolution.
Every AI model needs data centers, every data center needs more power, and every power system needs transmission, energy storage, cooling, water, roads and buildings. And all this is inseparable from concrete. The more digital the
world becomes, the more physical infrastructure is needed. The future of AI is not floating in the clouds, but standing firmly on the concrete foundation. This creates a very real opportunity for our industry.
Our mission is transformationIn
the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the wider developing world, infrastructure needs to be renewed and expanded.
Bridges are aging, the power grid must be strengthened, and renewable energy requires new foundations and transmission lines.
Urbanization continues to advance, digital infrastructure is expanding, and energy security has become a strategic priority.
Demand will not be our biggest problem. The real challenge lies in our mindset and whether we can meet these needs in a way that the planet can afford. For the first time
in the history of the cement industry, we have to take on multiple responsibilities at the same time:
build more and emit much less. Less waste, more efficient consumption.
Last but not least, protect the earth for our future generations.
Every generation has its own mission, and the mission of our predecessors is to rebuild.
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