Our business

Hanson UK is one of the largest suppliers of heavy building materials to the construction industry. We produce aggregates (crushed rock, sand and gravel), ready-mixed concrete, asphalt, cement and cement-related materials. We are part of the HeidelbergCement Group, which has leading global positions in aggregates, cement, concrete and heavy building products.

Turnover for the UK business in 2015 was £1,083 million. Capital investment for the year totalled £28 million. Our principal markets are in England and Wales and the central belt of Scotland. We have no production operations in Northern Ireland.

In March 2015 HeidelbergCement completed the sale of its building products businesses in the UK and North America to the US private equity investor Lone Star Funds. This included the UK brick, block and precast concrete operations. In July we sold our Scunthorpe ground granulated blast furnace slag (Regen) plant to the specialised mineral resources company Francis Flower Limited. This sale followed a study into the British aggregates, cement and ready-mix concrete markets by the UK Competition and Markets Authority, which concluded that we must dispose of one of our three Regen plants to increase competition.

We also moved out of the industrial sands business after selling our quarry at Wrotham in Kent and closing the operation at Reigate in Surrey, where the planning consent had expired. During the year we opened a number of mothballed production plants to cope with rising demand and in January 2016 we had 308 manufacturing sites and 3,481 employees.

Our headquarters is in Maidenhead, Berkshire, and our IT and shared service centre and UKAS-accredited national testing laboratory is in Chipping Sodbury, South Gloucestershire. We have customer service centres in Shepshed, Derbyshire, Ketton, Rutland and Allington, Kent.

The location of our production operations is determined by a number of factors, not least geology and planning constraints. Where practical, our sites are located close to core markets to reduce the costs and impact of transport. We operate a series of depots and wharves, supplied by road, rail and sea, to ensure the efficient transfer of aggregates and cement to areas of greatest demand and where local materials are not readily available.

Our business is managed in five business lines - aggregates, asphalt and contracting, concrete, cement and supply chain.

Hanson Aggregates produces and distributes crushed rock, sand and gravel from a network of quarries, depots and wharves. The division includes Hanson Bath Stone, which produces natural stone masonry, and Hanson Aggregates Marine, Europe's largest producer of marine-dredged sand and gravel which operates seven trailing suction hopper dredgers delivering to wharves in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

Hanson Asphalt and Contracting brings together management of our asphalt production sites and a national road surfacing and infrastructure contracting business. It also includes the asphalt and quarrying business Midland Quarry Products.

Hanson Concrete is the UK’s largest supplier of ready-mixed concrete from a network of 178 static and mobile production plants.

Hanson Cement is a leading manufacturer of cement, both in bulk and in bags, and produces Regen (ground granulated blast furnace slag) – a cement replacement in ready-mixed and precast concrete. The division includes our packed products business, which produces a range of bagged cementitious and aggregate products.

Our supply chain function provides a company-wide focus on transport, distribution planning and customer service and oversees over 6,000 deliveries every day by road, rail and water.

We also own the walling contractor Irvine Whitlock and run the joint venture Smiths Concrete.

Production operations 2015

Production operations 2015
Aggregates depots and wharves	12
Asphalt plants	36
Cement depots and wharves	7
Cement plants	3
Regen plants	2
Marine dredgers	7
Packed products plants	9
Quarries - sand and gravel	23
Quarries - crushed rock	24
Ready-mixed concrete plants	185
TOTAL	308