Project house DRA started 25 years ago in tough economic circumstances that were not too dissimilar from those prevailing currently.

DRA was known then as Dowding Reynard & Associates and was formed after co-founders Brian Dowding and Tony Reynard quit EL Bateman, in 1984, to go it alone.

The pair had been employed by Van Eck & Lurie (VEL), which Wally Lurie decided to sell to EL Bateman, only for Dowding, as the head of VEL’s electrical engineering department, and Reynard, its senior project manager, to depart from VEL, which was then in a state of rapid contraction owing to the adverse business conditions then prevailing.

But going it alone proved stormy as the fledgling DRA itself ran into a prolonged period of economic downturn that did not ease until 1992.

What made matters worse for the engineering entrepreneurs was that the well-staffed mining houses in those days contracted out far less project work to private project firms than they do today, and, when times got tough, the mining houses tended to take back the little bit of work that they did give out.

There were times during the period of prolonged downturn that DRA found itself in such dire financial straits that staff had to accept reduced hours and it is against that background that the company developed an ultra-conservative cash preservation culture that is still with it today.

The fact that all of DRA’s shareholders are also employees is a great part of the company’s strength, Dowding tells Mining Weekly.

In a sense, the company, by having employees who are owners, also inherits a natural succession plan, because, as the senior members of staff mature and want to exit the business, younger members of staff are in line to take up their leadership positions and to buy their shares.

As shareholders, employees are also more understanding when times are difficult, as they are currently, when finding enough work to compensate for project curtailment requires great effort.

While it is unrealistic not to expect even an employee-owned company to reduce staff when the workload is declining, Dowding points out that DRA, and one or two companies like it, now provide the project engineering wherewithal that was formerly the preserve of the mining houses themselves.

He believes that it would be a sad day for South Africa, and the mining houses themselves, if some of those teams were allowed to deplete excessively and be lost to the country, bearing in mind that these teams now replace many of the former in-house project resources of the mining companies.

While Dowding concedes that DRA has been seen by many as a platinum-focused company for several years, he hastens to remind that platinum is a base metal, and that the technology of platinum can thus be applied equally to nickel, where DRA has been active, and to copper and other base metals.

He says that DRA is fortunate to have a wide spread of process engineering capabilities in a wide range of minerals.

The company is very prominent in coal, prominent in chromium and manganese, strong in iron ore and good in diamonds, “to mention but a few”, he adds.

It should also be borne in mind, he says, that the DRA group’s operations company, Minopex, employs the bulk – 1 500 – of the DRA group’s total complement of 2 200 employees, and that the contract operations part of the business is not subject to the same vagaries as the 700-engineer project-management part, which is capital-investment dependent.

Contract-operating company Minopex operates plants in which capital has already been invested and offers greater plant efficiency and lower operational costs, which are in demand throughout the economic cycles.

Dowding thus sees Minopex as having a strong potential to continue to grow, even if growth cannot be guaranteed in the project-engineering and project-management parts of the business.

“Minopex adds a string to the bow of the company that is pretty well unique and actually is a very stabilising factor in the present circumstances,” he adds.

While Minopex is also proving to be an exportable service, on the company’s geographical spread as a whole, Dowding cautions that going into overseas markets is “never easy” and says that many companies have burnt their fingers by trying to set up heavily staffed global offices too quickly.

“We went through that learning curve in Australia well over ten years ago, and we have been relatively cautious since then. It puts the new geographical offices under too much pressure to expect too much from them too quickly,” he adds.

The global offices have the benefit of being able to access both existing designs and capa-bility from DRA in Johannesburg, together with what is often a favourable supply cost from South Africa, especially as far as equipment is concerned.

Yorkshire-born Dowding, who was brought to South Africa by Gold Fields in 1969 and who worked for the gold-mining company until 1977, happened to be in Yorkshire when Mining Weekly spoke to him for this inter- view, which led him, in typical self-deprecating style, to recount the oft-quoted ditty of ‘Yorkshire born, Yorkshire bred, strong in’t arm and thick in’t head’.

Dowding, who remains on the board of DRA’s holding company, Metopex, will be back to South Africa in July, and has settled in Knysna.

DRA’s black economic-empower- ment partner in South Africa is Shanduka Resources, headed by former trade unionist and politician Cyril Ramaphosa. Shanduka has acquired a quarter share in the mineral-plant design, project-management and contract oper-ations group.

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