JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – The ownership transition of Cementation Africa is enabling this underground mining contracting business to advance at a time of capital investment uptick in mining.

Transitioning outside of the Murray & Roberts group and beyond the business rescue process of Murray & Roberts Limited has given Cementation Africa the opportunity to shake off negative connotations and to re-establish itself as an underground contract miner.

“This ownership transition is really important for us as a business. It really enables us to focus on what we do, and that is mining,” Cementation Africa MD Japie du Plessis outlined to Mining Weekly during an interview in which Mark Salmon participated as the Head of Special Situations Fund at Differential Capital, which is Cementation’s new shareholder.  (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)

In navigating its way out of business rescue with Differential Capital, Cementation Africa has managed to retain all assets as well as skills.

“A very important role we play when we provide capital is helping to retain vital skills for the benefit of all stakeholders,” said Salmon, who expressed excitement about the future for the company, which is going all out to improve its African footprint and collaborating with its American sister company.

Branding has been aligned across jurisdictions and steps are being taken to leverage on common engineering design strengths across time zones.

In South Africa, Cementation Africa has a five-year contract for the execution of the underground mining development and construction works at Tharisa Minerals' chrome and platinum group metals mine.

In Zambia, it has reopened its office and is executing work at Mopani copper mine.

In Ghana, it has registered a fully compliant local business.

In raise boring, it is intent on expanding.

On the modernisation front, it is partnering with leading technology providers.

“Modern technology is really improving the efficiencies, improving safety and we’re constantly looking to identify where technology can assist us to improve our efficiencies, improve our safety performance and we'll never stop that process. We’ll forever constantly look to evolve as technology evolves and we’re already setting ourselves a challenge to find projects and operations where we can challenge ourselves to get to autonomous operations and even remote operations. We’re partnering with leading tech companies, and hoping, in the not-so-distant future, to share a little bit more about that,” Du Plessis revealed.

NEW SHAREHOLDER

The strategic focus of Differential Capital, an investment company, has been on using big data and AI within the financial services industry.

About two years ago, it identified a distinct opportunity in the mining contracting space, on the back of low capital investment in mining sector, “and that meant that institutions or companies that provided those services, were likely to have exceptionally good prospects,” Salmon explained.

Against that background, Differential Capital took the opportunity to acquire all the Cementation assets out of the business rescue process and to assist the African and American Cementation businesses. “They've done an amazing job in navigating that period and we're really excited about the future. You’ve already started to see capital investment announcements pick up over the last couple of months, and you’re starting to see order books become relatively robust,” Salmon pointed out.

Mining Weekly: What is on offer from your in-house engineering design office?

Du Plessis: We do anything from prefeasibility, feasibility studies all the way through to detail design work, and our most recent sizable design package was on Ivanplats’ Platreef, where we have transitioned a ventilation shaft into a fully operational rock hoisting shaft that assisted our client to unlock their development operations on the ground.

What skill sets are in greatest demand from your renowned training academy?

We’re really proud of that facility. We see it as a big differentiator for us. The skills that are in most demand are trackless engineering and operator skills and we mostly do that for our own internal consumption, and that’s where we focus. We also use our training academy as a conduit to develop local employees around the operations where we operate. We have successfully developed miners, shift supervisors, even mine overseers. We've developed a lot of artisans in all spheres of engineering, from rigging and boilermaking, all the way through to electricians. It’s a property that not only enables us to install the culture and the skills within our own workforce, but it also enables us to support our clients in their social labour responsibilities, specifically in terms of recruitment around the projects that we execute.

Tell us about raise drilling and the accuracy of the rotary vertical drilling system, RVDS.

RVDS is a technology that we developed some time ago with our German partners, and it really enables accurate drilling. Under normal, unguided circumstances, with shorter holes, you can expect accuracies of about 1%; longer holes, 2% unguided. But utilising the RVDS technology, we get to accuracies of 0.1% and 0.15%. It's really accurate and enables us to pilot into excavations over very long distances and hit those targets quite successfully. The raise drilling division is quite an integral part of our operations, and we believe that it specifically is an area of growth for us. We've got a big fleet of assets and we'll be attacking the market a lot more aggressively to get the asset utilisation up. We’re really excited about our raise drilling division and we’re expanding that in South Africa as well as in Africa.

Safety is the number-one priority of every mining company. What are your safety aspirations?

Our safety aspiration is that every single one of our employees returns home safely on a daily basis. Over the past 10 to 12 years, we really have done a lot in terms of finding engineering solutions to where we had historical injuries and fatalities, to engineer those dangerous situations out, and also to set a culture of safe execution. We do not want to execute if we can't execute safely and I must say I'm really proud to announce that we recently achieved eight-million fatality-free shifts as a mining contracting business doing a lot of non-routine work. We sank five vertical shafts in this period, so we’re exceptionally proud of that achievement, and we’re working towards nine-million fatality-free shifts. We've really done well to this point, but our focus is, on a daily basis, to ensure that we execute safely and that we create the environment where people feel safe to speak up if things are unsafe, so we can fix that. I think the culture that we've set in the business over a number of years is really assisting us.

And finally, what’s the big takeaway?

The big takeaway for us is Cementation Africa is here to stay. Cementation Africa is here to grow, and we’re really pushing to improve our African footprint, and we’re really looking forward to working collaboratively with our American sister company and also to build on our relationship with our new shareholder.