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Southern District Of New York Dismisses Price-Fixing Claims Against Concrete And Cement Additives Manufacturers
09/15/2026On September 2, 2026, Judge Lewis J. Liman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed with prejudice all claims against three major defendant concrete and cement additives manufacturers, holding that plaintiff purchasers failed to plausibly allege a conspiracy to fix prices of concrete and cement additives in the United States. In re Concrete and Cement Additives Antitrust Litigation, No. 24-md-3097 (S.D.N.Y.).
Concrete and cement additives (“CCAs”), ingredients added to cement, concrete, and mortar to improve safety and functionality, are construction inputs forming an $18 billion global market. In this multidistrict litigation, plaintiffs formed two putative classes: (i) direct purchasers, who directly purchased CCAs from one or more defendants; and (ii) indirect purchaser construction companies, who purchased CCAs manufactured by one or more defendants. Both sets of plaintiffs alleged that defendants—the world’s three largest CCA manufacturers and their corporate families—conspired to fix the prices of CCAs they sold to customers in the United States in violation of Sections 1 and 3 of the Sherman Act.
The Court initially dismissed plaintiffs’ complaints in 2025, finding that plaintiffs had not plausibly alleged an antitrust conspiracy because plaintiffs failed to allege requisite conduct of parallel pricing and sufficient “plus factors” supporting an inference of price-fixing in the United States. However, the Court permitted plaintiffs to file amended complaints. Plaintiffs’ amended complaints focused on the conduct of executives of three French CCA manufacturers (collectively, the “French Defendants”) and a non-party conspirator, who together allegedly executed the purported conspiracy through a French trade organization and raised CCA prices in Europe during specified months in 2021 and 2022.
The United States antitrust laws reach conduct located outside the United States that “was meant to produce and did in fact produce some substantial effect in the United States.” Hartford Fire Ins. Co. v. California, 509 U.S. 764, 796 (1993) (citing Matsushita Elec. Indus. Co., Ltd. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U.S. 574, 582, n.6 (1986)).
Accepting plaintiffs’ factual allegations as true, the Court found plaintiffs failed to allege any direct evidence of a conspiracy to fix CCA prices in the United States. Plaintiffs’ allegations of communications among the French Defendant executives only amounted to evidence of a conspiracy in France, and not in the United States. The Court observed plaintiffs made no allegations that U.S. affiliates of the French Defendants communicated with each other about CCA prices, nor were the U.S. affiliates involved in any conspiratorial communications. Crucially, plaintiffs failed to plausibly allege that any U.S. defendant increased CCA prices in the United States as the result of an inter-firm conspiracy among competitors. The Court concluded that plaintiffs had “tacked on” the phrase “including in the United States” to allegations of French conspiratorial conduct.
Turning to circumstantial evidence, the Court found that plaintiffs once again failed to plead parallel conduct among the U.S. defendants—required for a Sherman Act claim absent direct evidence of conspiracy. Plaintiffs only pled the kind of “episodic” price increases the Court found inconsistent with coordinated activity. The only domestic pricing allegation in the operative complaints was that the non-party conspirator imposed a fuel surcharge matching one imposed by a U.S. defendant, but plaintiffs did not allege that the two companies communicated or reached a prior agreement. Additional evidentiary submissions of defendants’ pricing data showed differences in timing, amount, geography, and product scope that precluded an inference of coordinated activity.
Similarly, the Court found that plaintiffs did not allege sufficient plus factors to make their claims plausible. Common membership in a trade association did not make it plausible that defendants used trade association meetings to conspire. Plaintiffs further failed to make a factual allegation supporting their claimed motivation for a U.S.-inclusive conspiracy (that a U.S. conspiracy was necessary to effectuate the French conspiracy). The Court also found that the Department of Justice’s closure of its grand jury investigation related to the CCA market, without a prosecution or enforcement action, weakened plaintiffs’ arguments that the existence of governmental investigations of defendants should serve as a plus factor.
The Court further held that plaintiffs’ claims could not be brought under the Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act of 1982, which applies the Sherman Act to foreign conduct that has a direct, substantial, and reasonably foreseeable effect on domestic commerce. Here, plaintiffs failed to establish any domestic effect because they did not describe a mechanism by which the French conspiracy would lead to higher CCA prices in the United States.
For the foregoing reasons, the Court dismissed plaintiffs’ claims with prejudice. The decision is a notable articulation of the limits of pleading foreign-origin price-fixing conspiracies under U.S. antitrust law.
Antitrust Litigation