Tehran Cement Fell About 14% in Three Weeks While Saveh and Abyek Held; the Bagged Premium Now Spans 9% to 41% (Friday, July 24, 2026)

About three weeks ago, in the report "Power rationing and gas cuts squeezed cement supply" (July 2, 2026), Sahmino noted that a 50 kg bag of Tehran and Saveh cement had reached about 253,000 tomans by June 30. Today the picture has changed, but not for everyone.

In Sahmino's price feed today, Friday, July 24, 2026, a bag of Tehran cement is 218,000 tomans, about 14% below three weeks ago. Over the same window Saveh was essentially flat and Abyek even edged up. This report follows two questions: why Tehran broke from the group, and why the gap between bagged and bulk prices is so uneven across producers. This analysis is not buy or sell advice.

The picture today

The prices below are from Sahmino's feed on July 24, 2026. The third column is our own calculation: the price of a 50 kg bag times 20, to put it on the same scale as the per-tonne bulk price.

Two things stand out at once. First, the range of bulk prices between the cheapest producer (Shahroud) and the most expensive (Saveh) is about 24%. Second, and stranger: the bagged premium runs from 8.6% in Tehran to 41.3% in Shahroud. In other words, the cost of "bagging" a nearly homogeneous commodity differs by almost fivefold across producers.

A note on the Firouzkouh row: in our feed the bulk reference is named "Firouzkouh Cement" and the bagged reference "Faraz Firouzkouh Cement." These may not be the same company, and the premium computed for this row should be read with caution.

The three-week change: Tehran broke away

Here one has to be honest, because reading this table hinges on a methodological point. The June 30 figures were cited in our earlier report as "wholesale" prices in a trading context, whereas today's figures come from Sahmino's price feed. If the two are not on the same basis, part of this roughly 14% drop could be a difference in basis rather than a real market move. Before any firm conclusion, the two should be reconciled onto a single basis.

Even so, even if part of Tehran's drop reflects a difference in basis, one fact remains: today Tehran is the cheapest bag on this list while its bulk price is not the highest but close to it. That combination is unusual and needs explaining.

Background: the summer that cut cement's power

To understand this market you have to look at this year's energy calendar:

• May 14, 2026: under an Interior Ministry order, power use by steel and mining industries was cut to as low as 10% of plants' demand. Mining, steel and cement associations wrote jointly to the president that the limit was "in practice tantamount to halting production and fully shutting the plants."
• Mid-spring into summer: regional power companies told industry their electricity quota would fall; per industry sources, the quota for some cement units dropped from 8 megawatts in late spring to 2 megawatts by early-to-mid summer.
• June 2026: Tavanir began rationing power to cement and steel province by province and county by county, with a plan to continue through the following month.
• At the same time: gas to cement plants in several southern provinces was fully cut, and those units switched to mazut (heavy fuel oil).

Ali-Akbar Alvandian, secretary-general of the cement industry association, warned at the time that these limits were being imposed precisely in the months of peak national cement demand, and that the result would be "lower output and a shortage of this product in the market." He also said the industry had tried to contain market pressure by raising supply.

Drivers: the puzzle of the bag premium

Why is the bagged premium 8.6% in Tehran and 41.3% in Shahroud? Several possible explanations, none proven in this report and offered only as hypotheses:

Geography and haulage. Bulk cement moves in a special tanker and its transport economics are weak over long distances; bagged cement travels better. A plant far from the demand center, like Shahroud, may sell bulk cheaply at the gate (because local buyers are limited) while its bagged product, which reaches farther markets, earns the industry's normal premium. Tehran, by contrast, sits at the heart of the country's largest consumption market; bulk demand from ready-mix concrete plants and large projects there is intense, and that can lift the bulk price and narrow its gap to bagged.

Bagging capacity. The bagging line is a physical bottleneck. A plant with limited bagging capacity and high retail demand naturally charges a larger premium.

Customer mix. The share of large projects versus building-trade retail differs across plants, and that mix maps directly onto the bulk-to-bagged price ratio.

Possible data heterogeneity. Part of this dispersion may reflect differences in delivery terms (at the gate versus delivered) or in each row's update date. That possibility should not be set aside.

A global comparison, and whose pocket this reaches

Tehran bulk cement, at today's free-market dollar of about 193,000 tomans, is roughly 21 dollars per tonne, and Shahroud about 17.6 dollars. By contrast, per IMARC data, cement is reported at about 54 dollars in China, about 96 in the United States, about 140 in the United Kingdom and about 250 in Germany per tonne. That is, Iranian cement costs less than half of the world's cheapest major market.

The reason is the same one we saw in the analysis "Iran makes the world's cheapest rebar": cement is a highly energy-intensive commodity, and energy in Iran is subsidized. The paradox is that this very industry, built on cheap energy, came close to shutting down this summer for want of that same energy.

Cement and rebar are the two main cost items in a building's frame. A roughly 14% swing in the bag price feeds directly into construction costs and, with a lag, into the finished price of housing. For a builder, the practical meaning of this table is simple: when the price gap between producers runs up to 24% in bulk and close to 41% in the bag premium, the choice of supplier and delivery form (bulk versus bagged) is itself a serious economic decision, not a logistical detail.

Outlook

In the background, the industrial-power file has just turned. About a week ago the industry minister announced a specialist committee between the industry and energy ministries to revise the industrial-blackout schedules. A coordination meeting on managing industrial power supply for the next two Iranian months then convened, attended by the energy minister, the industry minister and private-sector representatives and chaired by the president's executive deputy; per reports on July 22 and 23, it was agreed that industrial power would not be cut over those two months, to prevent production stoppages and preserve jobs.

In other words, the very limit that was meant to run to the end of the month, and that our earlier report identified as the main cause of tightened supply, has effectively been lifted. But here one must resist an analytical temptation: this decision cannot be the cause of Tehran's roughly 14% price drop, because that drop occurred over the past three weeks and the agreement was only just announced. The most one can say is that the expectation of the limit being lifted, from the time the review committee was announced, may have affected sellers' expectations. Real causality requires plant-level output and supply data that we do not have.

Risks and uncertainties

• Price-basis ambiguity: the June 30 versus July 24 comparison may be between two different bases; this is the biggest weakness of the present analysis, and it is recorded honestly.
• Durability of the power decision: the no-cut commitment is for these two months. After that, and especially in winter when the gas imbalance turns serious, the situation can reverse.
• Mazut and unit costs: units that switched to alternative fuel carry higher costs and an environmental problem.
• Generalization risk: this table covers five producers, not the whole national cement industry.

Bottom line

Three weeks after our earlier report, the cement market shows two new things. First, the Tehran bag price is down about 14% while Saveh and Abyek held nearly flat, a gap that may be partly real and partly a difference in price basis that still needs reconciling. Second, and separately, the dispersion of the bagged premium across producers runs from 9% to 41%, an unusual figure for a nearly homogeneous commodity that most likely reflects a mix of haulage geography, bagging capacity and customer mix. In the background, the fresh decision on industrial power is positive for cement supply, but it is a two-month breather, not a fix for the imbalance, and its real test is winter. This analysis is not buy or sell advice; it is simply an attempt to read a market more carefully than the single average number it is usually reported with.

What to watch

• The weekly volume and value of cement supplied on the physical floor of the commodity exchange; the best real gauge of production limits.
• Actual delivery on the power commitment over the next two months versus what was announced.
• Whether gas returns to the plants in the southern provinces.
• Further convergence or divergence of Tehran's price with Saveh and Abyek in the coming weeks; if the gap closes, the different-basis hypothesis gains support.
• Daily prices on Sahmino's materials page and events on the Sahmino calendar.