Three decades of concentration

Over the past thirty years, Pakistan’s cement industry has hardened from a fragmented mix of small producers into a tightly knit oligopoly. Or oligoply-like. In the early 1990s, the top four firms controlled just over a third of the market; by the 2010s, nearly half. Today, with the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index HHI (a measure of market concentration) above 1,000 and top-4 market share at 54%, a handful of players dominate production and pricing power. Data suggests that competition within the cement industry has quietly solidified into coordination.