What a fixed batching plant commits you to
Seven conditions have to hold before a plant makes its first cubic metre, and not one of them is the mixer people picture when they price a plant. A site you can hold for the length of the work. A power supply, or a generator sized for the mixer and the conveyors. Stockpile area for aggregate, with access good enough for tipper trucks to keep it filled. A cement silo. Water. Somewhere for washout to settle. And a way of getting the concrete from where it is made to where it is poured. None of that is exotic, and contractors install plants every week. The point is that each item is a condition, and a condition that fails does not make the plant cheaper, it makes it idle. The last one is the one most often left out of the comparison: production is not placement, and the standard written for ready-mixed concrete assumes a distance between them.
Source: stated as conditions rather than costs — we hold no price for a fixed batching plant and publish none. That the standard assumes a distance between batching and placing is the standard's own note, which tells a purchaser to consider the projected transportation time between the batch plant and the point of delivery; it is reproduced in the appendix to the Californian placement-times notice cited in the next section, and that appendix is where we read it.
The haul radius problem
The binding limit on a fixed batching plant is rarely how much it can mix. It is how far the concrete can travel before it has to be in the form. That clock starts at the start of mixing rather than when the truck leaves the gate, and where exactly that start falls is set by your specification: the two rules below define it differently. ASTM C94/C94M carried a one-and-a-half hour limit from mixing to the end of discharge from its first publication in 1935, and the current edition has taken it out. Clauses 6.1.9 and 6.1.10 now require the purchaser to state a drum-revolution limit and a time limit, and where the purchaser states neither, the producer has to establish them and communicate them before delivery, with the time limit printed on the delivery ticket. The number left the standard. The constraint did not. It moved into your specification, where somebody still has to choose it.
Some authorities have put a number back. California's Department of Health Care Access and Information, in Policy Intent Notice 82, effective 9 October 2025, requires discharge completed within one and a half hours of the mixing water being introduced to the cement and aggregates, together with a maximum of 300 drum revolutions of which no more than 100 may be mixing revolutions, and states that neither producer nor purchaser may waive those limits. It is not an absolute wall. The same notice lets placement run to 120 minutes for unplanned delays under a documented slump-and-temperature procedure, and allows a longer limit where the authority approves an alternative compliance method. That is one American authority writing for healthcare construction in one state; we do not assert it governs your contract or your country. What generalises is the shape of the rule: a fixed window the drive must fit inside, against traffic and road conditions the plant does not control.
Source: California Department of Health Care Access and Information, Policy Intent Notice 82, "Ready Mix Concrete/Grout Placement Times", effective 9 October 2025, https://hcai.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/PIN_82-Ready-Mix-Concrete-Placement-Times-10-02-2025-A.pdf — the time limit, the revolution limits, the no-waiver sentence, the 120-minute unplanned-delay procedure and the approved-alternative route are that notice's own policy section. The ASTM C94/C94M-24d clauses 6.1.9 and 6.1.10, and the note recording the 1935 limit, are quoted verbatim in its appendix, which is where we read them. Both are declared regulatory text, not measurements, and neither is asserted to apply outside its own jurisdiction.
How thin ready-mix supply is, where we have counted it
The question behind most batching-plant searches is not what a plant costs. It is whether anyone within reach will sell you concrete instead. We have counted that in one region only. Within 50 kilometres of each of ten cities in Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines, registered construction companies outnumber registered ready-mix suppliers by between 44.5 and 96.5 to one: Ho Chi Minh City 96.5, Hanoi 89.6, Makassar 84.9, Medan 80.2, Metro Manila and Iloilo both 69.6, Surabaya 68.7, Jakarta 63.0, Cebu 61.9, Davao 44.5. Inside one country the pattern does not run one way. In Indonesia the ratio climbs as the city gets smaller, from Jakarta at 63.0 to Makassar at 84.9. In the Philippines it does not: Cebu sits at 61.9 and Davao at 44.5, while Iloilo matches Metro Manila at 69.6. There is no single rule to take away, only a number per city.
Three things that ratio does not mean. It does not mean a plant is missing where the number is high: a registration is not a delivery radius, and one supplier with a fleet serves more work than three without one. It does not measure market size, because it counts business listings rather than capacity or volume, and one firm can be listed under more than one heading. And it does not travel between countries, because listing coverage differs from country to country — Jakarta against Makassar is a sounder comparison than Indonesia against Vietnam. The larger limit is the map itself. This count covers ten cities in three countries. We have not run it for Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania or any Latin American market, and we will not assume the pattern carries. Nothing on this page tells you how thin supply is in Nairobi or Lagos.
Source: our own count of registered business listings within 50 km of each of ten cities, taken in September 2026 from a commercial business-directory dataset. A later pull re-checked a different business category and left both of the counts behind this ratio unchanged. Listings, not plants, and not market size.
What the machine carries instead
A self-loading mixer moves three of the plant's functions onto the machine that will be standing next to the form: loading, proportioning and mixing. Five of the six mixer models we list carry, as standard equipment, a drum that lifts and rotates through 270 degrees, an automatic water-fill controller, an external suction water pump and a camera system covering reversing and the drum. Four of those five steer by articulation; the fifth has a rigid one-piece chassis with front-wheel steering and a hydraulic bucket that loads at the front and discharges at the rear. The sixth lists neither the controller nor the pump, and carries a high-capacity water tank with a self-priming system instead. The external pump is the item that matters on a site with no plumbed supply: the machine draws its own water from a drum, a bowser or a standpipe rather than waiting for a connection.
Weighing is where the answer differs by model, and it is worth being exact about, because proportioning by weight is the function a batching plant is bought for. Electronic hydraulic weighing is standard equipment on one of the six mixer models we list. On four of the six it appears in the optional list rather than the standard one, and that includes the SLM-18, the one model whose specification is complete enough for us to publish a full data sheet. On the sixth it appears in neither list. So if your specification requires every batch proportioned by weight, that is a line to settle in writing before the order rather than an assumption to carry into it — and on one of the six we cannot supply it from the catalogue at all.
What none of that tells you is output, and this site publishes no output figure of any kind: not cubic metres per hour, not per day, not loads per shift, and no fuel consumption. Our catalogue carries an output-per-hour column, empty and marked unverified on all six models. No manufacturer's document we hold states one either. A figure arrived at by multiplying a drum volume by an assumed cycle time is arithmetic wearing the clothes of a measurement, and it is the number a buyer would most reasonably rely on, which is exactly why it is not here. What we can give you is the size of one load: fourteen of the sixteen mixers in our specification file carry a discharge figure, and they run from 1.0 to 4.5 cubic metres. How many your site needs in a day is a calculation against your own crew and distances, and it will be a better number than ours.
The machine also has to reach the form, which is a dimension question rather than a capacity one. Ten of those sixteen mixers carry overall dimensions, and across the ten the width runs from 1.60 to 2.30 metres. One of them, the SLM-18, is read off a dimensioned drawing in travelling posture, at 7.06 by 2.21 by 2.58 metres. The other nine come from a supplier specification table that does not state whether the machine was measured travelling or working, so we use those widths — posture barely moves a width — and we do not present their heights as travelling heights. No turning radius is recorded for any mixer, so the turn into a yard is precisely the question these figures cannot answer. Ask for the drawing of the model you are buying, and ask before the order rather than after it.
Source: the equipment lists published with each model in our catalogue, as the manufacturers specify them, and the discharge figures from our full mixer specification file, where fourteen of the sixteen carry one — declared specifications, not measurements we made. The output-per-hour column in that catalogue is empty and marked unverified on all six models, which is why no output figure appears above. The overall dimensions, and where each of them comes from, are stated in the paragraph that uses them.
When a fixed batching plant is still the right answer
A plant wins when the demand sits still. If concrete is wanted continuously, from one location, for long enough to justify the installation, and there is ground and power to put it on, the fixed plant is the better machine and this page is not an argument against it. It also wins where several pour fronts run at once, for reasons of arrangement rather than measurement: a plant can be filling a second truck while the first is driving, and a single self-loading machine cannot load the next batch while it is discharging this one. Mixing in transit is the one overlap it has; the loading and the discharging happen in order. Rated power is documented for seven of the sixteen mixers in our specification file, and across the six models we list it runs from 78 to 91 kilowatts on five of them — one engine doing the loading, the mixing and the driving.
A plant also wins on paperwork. Where a specification demands proportioning certified per batch, batch tickets, a documented quality regime, or mix designs that change between loads, a fixed installation is built for that and a machine working off a site road is not — and, as above, on four of the six mixer models we list, weighing is an option rather than standard equipment. There is a third answer that beats both, and it should be checked first: if a commercial ready-mix supplier already sits inside whatever discharge window your contract sets, and can reach the pour inside it, buying concrete is simpler than owning anything. The case for a self-loading mixer begins where that supplier's clock runs out, where no such supplier exists, or where his truck cannot physically reach the form.
Source: rated power as declared — the sixteen-mixer count from our specification file, the five published values from the catalogue. The contrast between batching in parallel and working in series is reasoning about how the two are arranged, and it is deliberately stated as a difference in kind: no measured output exists on either side to make it a ratio.
What we cannot price for you
No price appears on this page, for the plant or for the machine, and the comparison a reader most wants is the one we are least able to give honestly. We hold no sourced price for a fixed batching plant of any size or configuration — not a quotation, not a band, not a published list — so a capital comparison would rest on a figure we made up. Our own pricing is a commercial decision that has not been taken, and no figure for it is published anywhere on this site. Setting two unsourced numbers beside each other and calling the result a payback period would be the most useful-looking and least true thing on the page, and it is the shape of claim that most of this category's marketing is built from.
The variables that would decide it are local in any case, and we have not measured them in any market: the price and tenure of the ground, a power connection or the fuel to replace it, what cement and aggregate cost delivered to that address, operator wages, and what a local ready-mix supplier already charges per cubic metre. Those five differ more between two cities than the equipment does, which is why a payback figure calculated in one country transfers badly to another. What we can put in writing is the model, what is documented about it and what is not, the shipping mode, and the documents that travel with it. The arithmetic is then yours, done with your own numbers, which is the only version of it that will be right.
Source: reasoning. No price of any kind is published on this site, and we hold no quotation, list or band for a fixed batching plant — the absence is the reason for the refusal, not a policy applied over available data. The five local variables are named as unmeasured; none of them is estimated here.