The ratings on Germany-based heavy materials group HeidelbergCement AG reflect Standard&Poor's Ratings Service's assessment of the group's business risk profile as "satisfactory" and financial risk profile as "aggressive." In our view, HeidelbergCement will continue to deleverage and improve its credit metrics, given management's willingness to protect profitability and allocate discretionary cash flow to debt reduction. Nevertheless, we believe that this deleveraging will occur at only a gradual pace from a low credit-measure base today. This is mainly because our outlook for the building materials sector does not anticipate a recovery before 2013. Our base-case scenario assumes sales growth in the low- to mid-single digits in the full-year 2012, and a broadly stable group EBITDA margin. This is due
