CONTRACT MINING
to spend several days with the group at its headquarters near Juiz de Fora, a city about 180 km from Rio de Janeiro.
It has grown to an impressive scale since then, and today is led by one of Gumercindo’ s sons, Sergio Machado, as CEO, with two other brothers, Renato and Marcelo as major shareholders and board members along with three other independent directors. The family retains 75 % ownership with a Spanish group owning 15 % and almost 200 U & M employees holding the remaining 10 %.
As of the end of 2024, U & M had more than 800 equipment units in its fleet, and over 3,000 employees – plus it holds more than R $ 400 million in spare parts, components and supplies in stock, which equates to about US $ 75 million.
The 380 strong fleet main mining fleet today is entirely composed of Komatsu, Hitachi and Cat machines – the Komatsu fleet including 79 730s, 27 930s plus 35 HD785s; the Hitachi fleet includes 8 EX5500s, 31 EX2500s and 33 EX1200s; finally Cat equipment covers 91 777s, 25 D11 dozers and 51 D9 dozers. There is also a large support fleet of over 400 other machines from ADTs to drills, graders, other trucks and other machines.
One of U & M’ s differentiators is this high level of standardisation of the fleet- which it says provides more in-depth knowledge of the maintenance and operation of the equipment essential to the business. This results in greater fleet reliability and simplified operational processes. Average availability is 84 % for the truck fleet and 87 % for the excavator fleet; and in 2024, about 300 Mt were moved. Some mining companies struggle to reach these availability figures even with new machines.
U & M has ten active mining projects in Brazil today, across all the major mining regions and major mining groups. It has two main workshops – one at the HQ in Matias Barbosa near Juiz de Fora, visited by IM, and one in Canaã dos Carajás in the Central Norte region. Both have similar capabilities and capacities.
Company values include safety & care for people is a major focus along with reliability – including both its mining services but also in its actions and the trust clients can have in the company. Safety wise its record is very good – with a 2024 all injury frequency rate of 1.26 per million hours worked and a LTI per million worked hours of 0.14.
The company is known globally for its rebuilding expertise. At the beginning rebuilds were done because it was needed to keep machines running, but today U & M sees it as the right thing to do and the most sustainable approach to contractor operations – as well as bringing more value to its own operations as well as to its clients.
Rebuilds are done both at the workshops and in the field. U & M says that it carries equipment and component maintenance and overhaul in its DNA. Commercial Director Mauricio Casara told IM:“ Since its foundation, the company has recognised the importance of deeply understanding its machines and equipment, and this spirit has brought us to where we are today.”
Rebuilds bring a lot of advantages from fleet agility to cost efficiency and even community development; plus it is much more sustainable, with 80-90 % reduction in new materials, 65-87 % reduction in energy consumption during the process, and a 65- 87 % reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Casara adds:“ When we know an engine is approaching end of life, we strip the machine completely and remove the complete engine module along with the radiator, gearboxes and pumps and replace it with an entirely new module that itself may have new components or reconditioned components.”
U & M also carries out its own tyre management. Truck trays are also repaired in-house as are excavator buckets using purchased cast lips and GET. Used equipment is acquired worldwide to be rebuilt and used on the company’ s fleet and also to provide stock for parts and overhauls.
In 2024, the 185 employees of the Matias Barbosa Reman Center and the 131 employees of the Canaã dos Carajás Reman Center delivered 905 reconditioned components, contributing to waste reduction and achieving a total reuse of over 2,000 t of components. Any parts that are bought are OEM parts but this is largely restricted to a few engines – and many of these are remans anyway.
Innovation-wise, the autonomous truck project was really ahead of its time for a company like this when it started in 2017; plus the same can be said of the hybrid truck project that began in 2020. This was not because the conversations were not had with the OEMs, but they weren’ t ready to provide autonomy or hybrid kits for U & Ms main equipment models and ages at that time.
So U & M simply chose to go its own way to have more control – still working with partners on sensors, on board computers and components but designing and integrating the platform and system entirely in-house.
Inside U & M’ s expansive reman center in Matias Barbosa, close to Juiz de Fora
International Mining | NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2025