The production of colored cement near the village of Tauz (now Tovuz), widely known far beyond the borders of modern Azerbaijan and located in the northwest of the republic about 430 km from Baku, was established in 1912. According to some sources, construction of the plant—designed for up to 4,000 tons of cement per year and owned by the joint-stock company for the production of Portland cement and other building materials "Tauz"—was carried out by the German concern Siemens.
The charter of the Tauz Plant Company, whose authorized capital amounted to 600,000 rubles divided into 6,000 shares with a par value of 100 rubles each, was granted the Highest approval on March 29, 1913.
The site for building the cement extraction enterprise was not chosen by chance: the lands of the Tovuz district are rich in limestones associated with the Upper Cretaceous (the so-called Cenomanian limestone-marl sequence), which in turn are excellent raw material for the cement industry.
Already in the Soviet era, in 1936, on the basis of research carried out by the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Cements (VNIITs), a special resolution of the Council of People's Commissars for the first time established industrial-scale production of white and colored cements at the Tauz cement plant. Ararat limestone was used as the raw material for producing white cement.
After the successful release of the first industrial batches of this key building material, the Tauz cement plant was switched to permanent production of white and colored (light cream, cream, beige, yellow, pink, red, green, blue, and black) cements. Product quality met the highest requirements in terms of whiteness, strength (grades 400 and 500), abrasion resistance, color stability, and durability. A few years after Victory in the Great Patriotic War, white cement output in Tauz was doubled and brought to 35,000 tons per year. Until its closure for natural reasons in 1980, the enterprise of the former joint-stock company for the production of Portland cement and other building materials "Tauz" supplied white cement to many large-scale and well-known construction projects across the Soviet Union.