JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – The newly named Cementation Africa is excited about setting the rebranded business on a new growth path.

As part of preparations to operate outside of the Murray & Roberts Group, the new “own entity” has begun its rebranding and renaming process.

“We’re extremely excited to continue under the Cementation brand. It's been a brand that we've been operating under prior to the merger with Murray & Roberts about 21 years ago.

“So, it's almost going back to our roots and we'll be utilising the same branding as our sister companies in the Americas and Canada, so that there's consistency in branding and naming conventions.

“We have our focus on Africa, hence the name Cementation Africa,” Cementation Africa MD Japie du Plessis outlined to Engineering News & Mining Weekly in an interview. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)

The rebranded Cementation Africa will continue to provide the same services to its clients.

It will continue to do shaft sinking, decline sinking, contract mining, and bulk excavations, with raise drilling and underground mining services continuing as specialities.

Its own in-house mine engineering design office will continue to offer design services to enable mammoth underground construction work and its world-class training academy in Carletonville will continue as one of its big contract mining differentiators.

Engineering News & Mining Weekly: Why has the name of your company been changed from Murray & Roberts Cementation to Cementation Africa?

Du Plessis: I think you're aware that the Murray & Roberts Group, and more specifically Murray & Roberts Limited, is currently in business rescue, and as part of the business rescue process, a consortium of investors led by the Differential Capital investment company, has bought out the mining businesses, both the mining business in South Africa, which is the business I'm leading, as well as the American business, the Canadian business, and they're buying that out of the Murray & Roberts Group. As part of our preparations to operate outside of the Murray & Roberts Group, as our own entity, we’ve started the rebranding and renaming process of our business.

What are the implications of this rebranding for yourselves and for the greater mining community?

For us, it's an opportunity for a new start. We've had two very challenging years that have passed, and for us it's almost a reset button that we can hit and we can steer the business in a new direction with the support of our new shareholder and without corporate drag and unsupportive shareholders. We’re excited to embark on this new journey. Our new shareholders trust the management team. They believe in this business. It's a good business and we're looking forward to setting this business onto a new path of growth.

Give us insight into the specialised underground mine design and construction services that you offer.

We do all our own design and fabrication for our temporary services on all projects where we execute. We also do permanent infrastructure designs for our clients, ranging from headgear to shaft infrastructure designs. We design pump stations, loading stations, bulkheads, underground substations. If you can think of any, any requirement for underground mining, we can design and build it. We really do everything from feasibility all the way through to detailed design, fabrication, and then our project teams execute.

Over the past two decades, a large number of mine shafts have been sunk by yourselves. What is distinctive about Cementation Africa’s shaft-sinking know-how?

We've really done a lot of shafts, about 15 000 m of shafts over the last two decades. It’s something that we're extremely proud of, and I think what's distinctive is that we know how to sink shafts safely. We have, over many, many years, reviewed our processes and our designs to not only make tasks easier, but also to apply technology that enables safe outcomes, and we’re still reviewing as we go. It's a never-ending process of reviewing and trying to make things better. I think what we also had to do in the past is to make decisions where we don't utilise certain equipment because of the inherent risks it introduces into the process, even though those pieces of equipment are perceived to be more efficient, more productive. But for us, people safety comes first.

Which modern technologies can Cementation Africa bring to mining projects?

Because we start greenfield projects more often than not, we’re able to deploy state-of-the-art machines to our projects. It's not necessarily the technology that we can bring to mining projects, but the way that we select the available technology into our process to support not only our mining efficiencies, but also the safety of our people, by removing them from hazardous work and deploying machines that are purposely built to execute those functions for us.

Tell us about the benefits of raise drilling and the accuracy that the rotary vertical drilling system RVDS brings to the market.

Raise drilling is a rapid means of access. Provided you've got bottom access, you can put small- to medium-shaft sizes down quite quickly. Because we're utilising the RVDS system, it provides for extremely straight and accurate drilling practices. That enables us to, in some cases, even equip raise-drilled shafts with hoisting infrastructure to allow for temporary hoisting, as opposed to normal ventilation type applications for raise-drilling operations. We've developed the technology with our German partners and it provides for extreme accuracy.

What are the advantages of the caisson methods of shaft sinking that you are credited with helping to develop?

Caisson shaft sinking methods have been around for many, many years. I think one thing that we've perfected as Cementation Africa is getting shafts through the Kalahari sands, utilising specific methods. We’re also partnering with a company, Herrenknecht, in Germany, where they’ve got a lot of technology and designs that can be applied in areas where there's a lot of water-bearing structures and difficult geology, in a wide range of diameters of shaft sinking, and we’re able to deploy that technology, not only in the mining space, but also in the civil space.

How many people are being trained by Cementation Africa and what skill sets are you bringing to the world of mining?

Our training academy is extremely busy, mostly for our own purposes, but we also have training interventions on behalf of clients. We do about 10 000 training interventions a year at our training academy and it's an amazing facility. It provides us with the opportunity to employ from the local communities and support our clients with their Social and Labour Plans, when it comes to recruitment. We can take guys that have got no mining experience and bring them into our projects and execute our projects with guys from the local labour-sending areas. We do all sorts of training interventions, from normal, general safety training to supervisory training, operator training. The full skill sets that we deploy on our projects, we train within our training academy. We also do a lot of blasting ticket training, where we train our internal employees to become miners. We also facilitate learnerships for artisanal training and government certificate of competency training. It's a whole host of interventions that we do offer, and it's a facility that really differentiates us amongst mining contracting companies around the world.

Keeping everyone and everything safe at all times is of paramount importance. Where does Cementation Africa stand when it comes to the crucial question of safety?

Safety is of utmost important for us.  We achieved eight-million fatality-free shifts at the end of last year, and that's something that we’re extremely proud of. It's been a 12-year journey for us, so we've had to do a lot of hard work. I think because we train and develop our own talent, we’ve managed to embed our culture of safe execution into our business. People buy into our target of achieving zero harm and because they feel cared for, they’re trained well, they’re provided with the equipment and the systems to execute safely. We can expect that our people execute our projects safely.