Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Yamama Cement Company
Yamama Cement makes and sells cement, the gray powder that binds concrete, to construction companies and builders mostly in Saudi Arabia.
Yamama Cement is one of Saudi Arabia's oldest and best-known cement makers. It produces the gray powder that gets mixed with sand, gravel, and water to make concrete — the stuff that holds up apartment towers, highways, bridges, and factories. Its customers are construction companies, contractors, and concrete plants, not everyday shoppers. When Saudi Arabia builds, Yamama sells.
The business is simple on the surface: dig limestone and clay out of the ground, crush and heat them in giant kilns until they fuse into clinker, grind that clinker into fine cement, and ship it out by truck. Cement is heavy and cheap per ton, so it rarely travels far — a plant's real moat is being close to the customers. Yamama has spent years building a huge new plant east of Riyadh to replace its aging one, which cuts fuel costs and lets it serve the capital region, Saudi Arabia's biggest construction market, more efficiently. Its main rivals include Saudi Cement and Qassim Cement, and the sector is watched closely because cement demand tracks government spending and the huge building plans tied to Vision 2030. The catch is that cement is a commodity, and nobody pays extra for a bag stamped with a particular brand if a cheaper one is nearby. Prices are set by the market, demand rises and falls with the construction cycle, and energy is a big cost. That makes the business cyclical and competitive rather than glamorous. It also means investors mostly care about two things: how much cement gets sold in the Kingdom, and how efficiently each ton is produced.
Yamama pays out a good chunk of its profits to shareholders as dividends, which is common for mature Saudi industrial firms with limited growth options. The new, more efficient plant should lower costs and improve margins if volumes hold up — but if construction slows, even a lean plant sits partly idle.
Saved answer · last researched 9 Nov 2026
BIG PICTURE
Yamama makes about one in seven bags of cement sold in Saudi Arabia this year
- 15.3% Yamama's share of Saudi cement sales
- 84.7% Sales by all other Saudi cement makers
Cement is a plain product sold by several big Saudi firms, so winning customers is a fight for every tonne. Through July 2026, Yamama supplied 15.3 percent of all cement sold in the kingdom, ahead of Saudi Cement at 13.7 percent. The company earns its money almost entirely from this domestic market, which makes that lead the clearest sign of its strength. Source: Zawya, data from 2026
Timeline
Yamama Cement Is Founded
Saudi Arabia needed building materials, and in 1956 Prince Mohammed bin Saud Al-Kabeer and a group of founders — including members of the Al-Jomaih, Al-Humaid and Al-Arifi families, plus National Commercial Bank and Riyadh Bank — set up Yamama Cement to make them. It is one of the oldest construction materials producers in the country, and it has stayed near the top of the national pack ever since.
Production Begins in Riyadh
A company on paper became a real factory in 1966, when Yamama started commercial cement production in Riyadh with a line capable of 300 tonnes of clinker a day. Small by later standards, but it was the moment the venture started actually making and selling cement.
A Radical Factory Upgrade
By 1985 the old production systems were holding the company back, so Yamama rebuilt the factory around a new preheating short kiln with a capacity of 3,000 tonnes a day. That one change modernized production and gave the company room to grow far beyond its early scale.
A Billion-Riyal Expansion
Yamama launched a programme worth about a billion riyals to bring in German technology and push its clinker capacity higher. The expansion ultimately took the company to seven production lines and roughly 6 million tonnes of clinker a year — a producer built for serious volume.
The Export Ban Bites
Saudi Arabia capped cement prices in 2007, then banned cement exports in July 2008, and Yamama found itself pushing to get that ban lifted. It had sold about a tenth of its output abroad in the first half of the year, and output slipped to 4.5 million tonnes from 4.7 million. Worse for the whole industry, the government had handed quarrying rights to six new cement companies back in 2005, so the threat of too much capacity hung over everyone.
A Stake in Hail Cement
With exports blocked at home, Yamama put 60 million riyals into a 5% stake in the new Hail Cement Company. The idea was to protect its share of the domestic market while opening a door to export markets — Hail was ideally placed to supply Iraq.
A New Chief Executive
Jehad Bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Rashid became Chief Executive Officer in April 2021, after serving as Director General and as a director until then. A leadership change at the top of a company that had been run by the same circles for decades.
Profit Slumps and the Stock Falls
In October 2025 Yamama shares dropped as much as 9.5% to 28.62 riyals, making it the worst performer on the Saudi benchmark index. Third-quarter net profit had fallen more than 63% from a year earlier to about 36 million riyals, pulled down by lower selling prices and higher admin and selling costs — on track to be the stock's sharpest one-day fall in nearly five and a half years.
Line 7 Comes Online
Yamama commissioned the third production line, Line 7, at its new Al-Halal North plant, with clinker capacity of about 12,500 tonnes a day. The expansion sharply boosts output and efficiency and puts the company in position to grab more of Saudi Arabia's growing construction market — though in March 2026 it was dropped from the FTSE All-World Index.