Datadory notebook
How Investors & Quants Use Construction Materials Data
Investors and quants use construction materials data as a three-layer stack: asset-level plant databases (Global Cement and Concrete Tracker, 3,884 plants in 171 countries), monthly physical-output series (CICero, Eurostat) for cycle reads, and CO2 or embodied-carbon records for transition-risk factors. Eleven of the 15 datasets Datadory rates relevant here are free.
1,744 datasets. Pick your catch.
What does a construction-materials quant stack actually look like?
Ranking matters for expectations. Construction materials sits mid-pack among the 109 industries that clear the relevance bar for this persona - 74th of 109 by strongly-relevant count - because the sector offers no point-of-sale tape and no satellite feed. What it does offer is unusually clean provenance: GCP-CEM attributes every single data point to its source, which is rarer than it should be in alternative data.
For the page-level shortlist behind this article, see best data for construction materials teams, or browse everything in the construction-materials data hub.
Where do monthly flows beat quarterly filings?
A third series belongs in the drawer marked history-only. Cement Production, Shipments and Stocks (Table 16100042) gives 2,067 monthly Canadian series from January 2004 to March 2017, then stops - released 2017-06-12 and discontinued unrevised. Useful as pre-2017 training history; useless as a live input.
How do you turn carbon records into a tradable factor?
Global CO2 Emissions from Cement Production (GCP-CEM) is the deepest country panel available: annual cement and clinker production with computed process CO2 for 214 countries and territories from 1880 to 2025 (clinker from 1900; the May 2026 release, version 260526). Nine countries get detailed national workbooks - China's reaches back to 1949 and includes monthly NBS series - and every data point carries source attribution. About 2.5 MB across nine CSV/XLSX/ZIP files, commercial delivery terms 4.0, maintained by CICERO for the Global Carbon Project. For factor construction that means you can score any listed producer's home and export markets on cement-process carbon intensity back before most exchanges existed, and document the vintage you used.
The honest limitation: none of these arrive joined to tickers. Mapping plant coordinates and country-year intensities onto issuer entities is your job, which is precisely why the PermID and LEI columns in the Oxford database matter more than their size suggests.
Pick up where this leaves off
Every one of these ships with sample rows before you commit to anything.
Global Cement and Concrete Tracker — Plant-Level Dataset
Global Database of Cement Production Assets and Upstream Suppliers — Asset-Level Dataset
Monthly Global Cement Production Data (CICERO)
Eurostat Production in Construction Index
Cement Production, Shipments and Stocks (Table 16100042)
VALUE · STATUS · SCALAR_FACTOR
Global CO2 Emissions from Cement Production (GCP-CEM)
Want rows instead of a pitch? Name the datasets.
API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.
Get a sampleQuestions worth asking
What is the best free alternative data source for cement stocks?
Monthly Global Cement Production Data (CICERO) is the strongest free flow signal: a machine-readable CSV collation of reported monthly cement and clinker production holding 175 series, with 70 series across 24 countries linked to live national statistics offices. Pair it with Global CO2 Emissions from Cement Production (GCP-CEM), which publishes annual country-level cement production from 1880 to 2025 under commercial delivery terms 4.0 with every data point attributed to its source.
Which datasets work for backtesting rather than point-in-time checks?
Three carry genuine history: Eurostat's sts_copr_m reaches January 1990 through June 2026 in monthly volume indices, CICERO's monthly file runs from 1982 (Taiwan) onward, and GCP-CEM spans 1880 to 2025 across 214 countries. Avoid Statistics Canada Table 16100042 in any backtest: it covers only January 2004 to March 2017 and was discontinued unrevised on release in June 2017.