Both companies have significant and overlapping capacity in countries such as France, Germany, Spain, Czech Republic, Romania and Serbia, said Morningstar analyst Elizabeth Collins. Lafarge estimates in its annual report that it has a cement market share of 40 percent in the U.K., 34 percent in France, 33 percent in Canada and 12 percent in the United States. It goes above 30 percent in several east European and African countries. Both Lafarge and Holcim took on a big pile of debt in the past decade to expand in emerging markets, where rampant urbanisation has fed demand for building materials. Then came a perfect storm. The U.S. housing bubble burst, Europe sank into a sovereign debt crisis, and demand collapsed. Lafarge further suffered when the Arab Spring sparked unrest in the very markets it had banked on with its 8.8-billion-euro ($12-billion) takeover of Egypt's Orascom Cement in 2008.