profile
were there. It was also great to see how the
industry’s demographics are changing, with
more woman taking leadership roles. Overall,
this year’s conference had a great spirit – and
I’m not just talking about the party! We had a
lot of fun even talking to our competitors and
that is something good to look back on.
From a business point of view, yes we
made some good contacts, but that wasn't
the main purpose of our stand, it was
much more important to us to speak to our
existing and potential customers face-to-
face and build those relationships within
the industry.
RG: Caldas Engineering is a small,
family-run business. How do you
manage to have such an extensive
geographical reach with only 25
employees?
RC: Well, even though we only have
25 employees, we have representation
throughout the country through what
I like to call our associate companies.
I don’t like using the word ‘dealer’ or
‘agent’, because that is very impersonal
and to me, ‘associates’ is more descriptive
of our culture as a company and of our
relationships with those people.
RG: What would you say are the
biggest challenges the quarrying and
construction-related industries are
facing in the region?
RC: One of the biggest challenges is a lack of
infrastructure development. There is a lot of
talk about the importance of infrastructure
development, and the government’s
national development plan, but very little
is actually happening. The public sector is
a big driver of infrastructure development,
so the delays on that end have a significant
impact on us. But essentially, demand for
our products and our customers’ products
is driven by projects and development, and
there just isn’t enough happening. Another
one is fluctuating commodity prices, which
impact across all industries, including ours,
but also impact regional economies, which
then also affects development.
RG: What would you say are the
biggest opportunities for your business
and industry?
RC: For us, the two areas we are focusing
on is creating new markets in Africa, and
growing our presence in the mining industry,
that's where the opportunities are for us.
The parts and services we supply are broadly
applicable across a host of applications, not
just the quarry and aggregates industry,
and we are also active in ferrochrome, gold,
diamonds and even coal. We are looking
specifically at growing into the copper
belt in the DRC and Zambia. We have
been present there for a while, but not as
successfully as we would like because it’s also
a commodity-driven market. But there's a
lot of mining development in East and West
Africa currently, and Tanzania specifically, is
another area we are looking at.
RG: Two big areas that came up at
the conference, aside from legislation,
were environmental sustainability and
technological advancement. How do
these areas impact your business?
RC: The critical aspect for our products
is metallurgy. We are constantly trying to
find new alloys to offer increased wear life
and help our customers to reduce their
production costs. Another area that we focus
on, and this is an area that Michael drives a
lot, is improving design profiles for specific
applications. As a small company, we have a
lot of flexibility to work with our customers to
develop solutions that are specifically tailored
for their operations and the local conditions,
and so on, and testing is a critical part of this.
We believe it gives us an advantage over our
major global competitors, because it allows us
to tailor our products to what our customers
need, rather than offering only stock-standard
products designed for general applications.
Everybody seems to think that crushing
is crushing. It's not. There's a science
attached to crushing, and people need
to understand that while the equipment
that's used for crushing can be changed,
the geological and physical properties of
the material that needs to be crushed can’t
be changed. And that’s the area that we
want to work in. Customers buy standard
equipment from OEMs, and we come in
once they are operating to identify the
specific challenges they are facing and
help them to address those challenges by
using better metallurgical processes or
improved profiles.
In this game, what a laboratory tells
you and what happens in the field are two
different things. In-the-field testing is vitally
important to us, because even when people
are operating in very similar applications,
they can use their equipment in very
different ways, so we rely on our customers
to give us specific feedback about products
QUARRY SA | JULY 2017 _ 33