Listed Mining Companies
COMMENT PRINT By: Neal Goldwyer
15th June 2007
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Some of the company’s biggest orders come from the platinum-mining sector, which, van Schalkwyk says, accounts for about 80% of mining- related pump orders at present.
Recent orders include a R1,1-million order from Anglo Platinum for its Amandelbult platinum mine, and a three-phase order from Potgietersrus Platinum Limited (PPL) valued at R1,8-million.
Amandelbult will receive 32 pumps from across the Watson-Marlow 500, 600 and 700 ranges, as well as tubing.
Meanwhile, PPL is replacing its old SP range of pumps with the new-generation direct-coupled patented peristaltic pumps. The first batch, worth about R800 000 was delivered in October 2006. The most recent second-phase order worth R850 000 was delivered in just eight working days and consisted of five SPX65s, eight SPX25s, four SPX15s and sixteen SPX10s. Van Schalkwyk expects that the third and final phase delivery should be completed within the next quarter.
Large orders for Watson-Marlow Bredel pumps were also received in 2006 for Rustenburg Platinum, valued at R900 000; Two Rivers, valued at R1,3-million; and a number of Lonmin mines, to the value of R900 000.
In March 2007, the company received the first of several orders from the small platinum operation, Crocodile Mine. This order for six close-coupled pumps and tubing is valued at R100 000. The mine plans to replace all 30 VerderLab pumps that it ordered from Watson-Marlow Bredel South Africa competitor Verder South Africa in September 2005, over the coming months, as its budget allows.
Watson-Marlow Bredel South Africa considers this a glowing endorsement of its products. Though slightly more expensive than some other pumps, they compensate for this with superior reliability, accuracy and spares availability, Van Schalkwyk states.
(A spokesperson for Verder South Africa confirms that the pump product in question has since been discontinued.)
All pumps are manufactured at the company’s three main factories situated in Holland, England and Sweden. Parts are then assembled at its Watson-Marlow Bredel South Africa facilities in Honeydew, which holds stock to the value of R6-million at all times to meet local demand.
Van Schalkwyk estimates that “at least 75% of the world market [for peristaltic pumps is held by] Watson-Marlow Bredel, and at least 75% to 80% of the market in South Africa”.
“Our goal for the next couple of years is to capture those markets that will primarily consider a peristaltic pump over any other product,” he adds.
This goal encompasses retro- fitting obsolete ranges and new installations across both mining and nonmining sectors of industry.
Six years ago, the company started replacing its old SP range of pumps with the new patented SPX range.
Developers are currently modifying the prototypes in line with lessons learnt from extensive endurance testing in Europe. Marketed as durable and low- maintenance, Bredel’s new-gener- ation SPX series pumps are 25% stronger, 10% lighter, use 30% fewer parts and have a 30% smaller space footprint than previous models.
The company has so much confidence in the products that, as of January 1, this year, it extended the warranty on the 520, 620 and now 720 series pumps to five years. The company’s UK arm, Watson-Marlow, detected a near-zero incidence of returned pumps even with established three-year guarantees in place and thus decided to extend this.
Van Schalkwyk reiterates that peristaltic pumps are a niche product and represent, perhaps, only 3% of the world pumps market. However, they are ideally suited to peculiarly abrasive and corrosive applications, he points out, even though knowledge in industry of their uses may not be as widespread as it is about the more popular centrifugal pumps.
One of the key design factors of peristaltic pumps is that the pumped product remains in the pump hose and does not come into contact with any moving com- ponents of the pump, such as the gearbox bearings.
Product is squeezed through the tube or hose by a number of external rotating shoes or rollers. These hose pumps combine the advantages of a close-coupled pump, namely a small footprint, and the fully protected drive of bare shaft (long- or direct-coupled) pumps. The patented direct-coupled gearbox plugs directly into the pumphead. This creates a buffer zone between the pumphead bearings and the gearbox bearing, protecting both and providing timely warnings of potentially damaging lubricant seal failure.
Because the rotor is fully and centrally supported by its own bearings, the gearbox bearings are spared the load from the overhanging pumphead.
“The pump can run dry without any damage to the mechanism. This is the major advantage of peristaltic pumps over progressive cavity pumps, for instance,” Van Schalkwyk explains.
He works hard to educate industry participants about peristaltic pumps, not only to improve business but also to prolong the working life of, and customer satisfaction with, these machines.
The company already conducts in-house repair work but hopes that a specialised preventative maintenance department will enable it to satisfy mines by making staff avail-able to perform on-site repairs to machinery. This will further augment the company’s already central customer service policy, saving its clients time and undue expense.
Just as pump performance may be hampered by a worker’s lack of familiarity with the different mechanism of a peristaltic pump, it can also suffer if the pump is used with counterfeit and unapproved auxiliary components.
“Nine times out of ten, a customer will place an order for the complete system, which includes the pump, motor and gearbox,” Van Schalkwyk says. Watson-Marlow Bredel’s preferred suppliers of pump motors and drives, with whom the company has a long relationship, are standard motors and drive specialists SEW Eurodrive, Brevini and WEG. The three companies’ products are standard for mining applications in many of the mines operated by major companies, he adds. The company boasts a number of prestigious contracts this year from the nonmining sector.
It has secured an order from Rand Water’s Suikerbos Plant, near Johannesburg, for the installation of twelve SPX80s, five SPX65s, three SPX50s and two SPX40s to be used in lime slurry and silica dosing at the plant.
The order is worth R1,5-million – a substantial boost in revenue from the water sector compared with the R10 000 to R15 000 it earned the company in 2006. Van Schalkwyk calls this order “a major breakthrough in the nonmining industry”.
SAB-Miller uses the company’s range of pumps in its European breweries and the Bredel industrial pump range is already standardised for all of the brewer’s African oper-ations, he explains.
Van Schalkwyk’s personal goal is to capture as great a share of the available nonmining sector demand in South Africa as possible.
In order to pursue this crucial market segment (which includes water, sewage, effluent, petrochemicals, food and beverage) and continue to provide the company’s existing and potential mining sector clientele with dedicated service, Watson-Marlow Bredel South Africa will assign two special- ised sales-persons to focus purely on mining and nonmining.
As part of its expansion programme, the company appointed another sales engineer, Chris van Vuuren, at the end of May, 2007, bringing the total number of new sales and customer-care employees this year to four.
The company has three primary manufacturing hubs that specialise in extending peristaltic pump technology to various applications. The larger industrial range of peristaltic pumps is manufactured at the Bredel factory, in Delden, the Netherlands. The Watson-Marlow factory in Falmouth, England, manufactures a range of smaller peristaltic pumps and the Alitea factory, in Sweden, is responsible for the smallest of the company’s range of peristaltic pumps geared mainly for original-equipment manufacturers.
Edited by: Laura Tyrer
