Standard & Poors upgraded Titan Group to BB+ from BB with a stable outlook. 

As the credit rating agency explains, the upgrade reflects the assessment that Titan Cement's remarkable improvement in financial leverage over the past two years and the group's fundamentals will likely strengthen further in 2024–2025.

Strong sales and margin improvement, coupled with higher free operating cash flow, enabled the group to substantially reduce financial leverage last year, with S&P Global Ratings adjusted debt to EBITDA falling to 1.4x at year-end from 2.6x in 2022. Over the same period, funds from operations (FFO) to debt improved to 57% from 32.3%. We forecast the company's profitability and cash flow to remain resilient in 2024–2025.

This will translate into further additional credit metric improvements, with adjusted debt to EBITDA of 1.0x–1.5x and FFO to debt of 65%–70% in 2024–2025.

We expect these strong operating results to continue over the 2024–2025 period, he notes. This is mainly driven by consistently high cement prices, alongside stable demand in key countries, particularly the US and Greece. We expect sales to grow by 4%–5% in 2024–2025, based on our forecasts for softer but still resilient growth.