Steel Construction Vol 40 No 2 - Tubular Steel Feature | Page 30

SAISC SUBSIDIARIES: ISF ISF steps up international marketing of Southern Africa’s structural steelwork and general construction capabilities The ISF Chairman, Dodds Pringle and Director, Neels van Niekerk, just returned from an extensive visit including attending the PDAC mining event in Toronto, Canada as well as further interacting with the London based main contractor procurement team for the Anadarko Mozambique LNG project. Contact: Neels van Niekerk, Director ISF Email: [email protected] Tel: [phone] NvN advises that our international competition are all stepping up their efforts to secure contracts in the vastly reduced international construction market. We have no choice but to follow suit and we urge South African companies to increase their marketing efforts, not only inside South Africa, but also to their clients outside our borders. The general message from the mining community present at the PDAC event was clear:“No recovery expected in the short term, cost cutting to keep mines alive must be the short term objective”. The exception seems to be the gold mining industry. Gold is not viewed as a commodity but as “safe money”. Although Canada’s Central Bank, for example, just sold their last bit of gold, this is not the general trend. More and more private and banking concerns are again beginning to favour gold in the current global economic uncertainties. This in turn has led to the recent turning point in the international gold price. We were therefore not surprised to learn of many EPCMs involved in new gold studies, both greenfield and brownfield. We can expect an increase in budget quote requests in the shorter term. www.isf.co.za 28 Steel Construction Vol. 40 No. 2 2016 We are also currently engaging with logistics companies in an attempt to find economically feasible container rates to Central American countries to enable South Africans to partake in the current copper and gold mining developments of that region. The ISF has realised some time ago that we must reduce our export dependencies on the mining industry with infrastructure and energy the two obvious alternatives. In energy our best progress is with oil and gas, currently concentrating on projects in Northern Mozambique. An ISF team visited the major oil & gas EPCMs in Houston during August last year. This was followed with a visit during November last year to the French office of the CCS JV that won the contract for the construction of the Anadarko project and a visit to the London Procurement office in March this year. Although most companies tend to be fixated on possible supply to the main onshore “battery” or nearshore jetty structures for the Anadarko project (total exceeding 100 000 tonnes), many opportunities exist for our members and other South African enterprises in the numerous sub-contracting packages for “outside battery” infrastructure. The ISF will have a stand at the largest global oil & gas event, OTC Houston May ’16, and we will use the opportunity to again visit the major Houston EPCMs. Three Houston based consortiums are currently bidding on the Mozambique LNG Onshore part of the ENI Mozambique LNG project. This will be followed up with the ISF assisting the dti in arrangements for the visit to the gas rich Mozambican side of the Rovuma Basin in the Cabo Delgado province to take place during late May this year.