In early May, Blue Circle Industries successfully rebuffed a US$5.76 billion hostile takeover effort by Lafarge SA. Lafarge and its investment bank, Dresdner Bank AG, own a combined nearly 30% of Blue Circle shares, and the increased final bid attracted an additional 15% of acceptances from Blue Circle shareholders (totaling about 44.5%), but "clearly, we didn't win," said Lafarge's president, Bertrtand Collomb.

By late May, reports began surfacing that Blue Circle has refocused its attention toward buying Houston-based Southdown Inc, which Blue Circle has reportedly made a US$3 billion bid. According to a recent interview with Blue Circle America's CEO Gary Gentles, the company had been in early discussions with Southdown late in 1999, and that perhaps when Lafarge discovered this, it made a move to acquire Blue Circle before the British company's purchase price was out of reach.

Blue Circle officials still say the talks with Southdown are in the very early stages, and it is not certain whether the negotiations will result in an agreement. But since Southdown's March announcement that it was boosting its efforts to get its share price up-effectively announcing the company was for sale-other cement company names have been tossed around as potential buyers, including the Portuguese giant Cimentos de Portugal SA (Cimpor), which said it was preparing to launch a takeover offer for Southdown in alliance with Brazil's Votorantim. A report in the financial daily Diario Economico indicated that the takeover would cost Cimpor and its Brazilian ally about US$2.9 billion.