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On-The-Air (08/05/2015)

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8th May 2015

By: Martin Creamer

Creamer Media Editor

  

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Every Friday morning, SAfm’s AMLive’s radio anchor Sakina Kamwendo speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly.  Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:

Kamwendo: The new spinoff from the world’s biggest mining company comes with a 200-job sweetener to the Golden City.

Creamer: We spoke about the BHP Billiton spinning off South32 and we didn’t realise it was going to have such an overwhelming yes vote with 98% of people going for it. South32’s assets in South Africa, which are mainly aluminium, coal and manganese assets, form about a third of that. What is interesting is that there is a 200-job sweetener spinoff for the Golden City, which is Johannesburg. We were expecting some sort of deal that would give us something extra. In Kuala Lumpur, BHP Billiton has this big operation, which deals with information technology, invoice processing, payment runs and everything. It supports 50 000 employees and just about every continent. Now they are going to mimic that in Johannesburg. They are going to have 200 quality jobs where people actually do the entire invoice processing from a services centre in Johannesburg. We at first thought that it was going to be in Cape Town, now they are saying Johannesburg will have those quality jobs. That is an unexpected bonus from the spinoff. It is logical because South Africa sits between Australia and South America and the new South32’s assets are in those countries, so it is logical that we should have it. It is interesting that BHP Billiton said they would like to create more of these centres for themselves, because they will find that they cut the costs.

Kamwendo: The South32 spinoff also opens the way for black business to take over the ownership of major South African aluminium assets.

Creamer: This is an even bigger spinoff where you have in KwaZulu-Natal that Bayside casthouse, which is now going into black-ownernship. It will be black-controlled, because it is 60% ownership of this. They will get 96 000 tons of liquid aluminium, which is also interesting, because it never happened before. Liquid aluminium has energy saving implications will be cast into various aluminium slabs, which they will then sell off to Hulamin. This really boosts aluminium rather then diminishes it. So, already South32 hasn’t even gone on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange yet and we see this activity behind the scenes, which, of course, will give it black-economic empowerment credentials as well. Isizinda Aluminium is going to be headed by the past president of Zululand Chamber of Commerce, Sizwe Khumalo. He has been wanting to add value to aluminium for a long time and now he has got this chance where you can even make use of a large property around there that comes with this deal where Isizinda could create rod and all sorts of other aluminium products like wire, that could lead to more added value from aluminium in South Africa. He is linked up, of course, to Hulamin, in which the State has a big share through the Industrial Development Corporation. It is interesting that the site on which Isizinda will operate  is formerly State-owned, that was the old Alusaf and now it has gone into black majority hands.

Kamwendo: Mali is introducing advanced new mining technology that goes well beyond South Africa’s mine mechanisation strides.

Creamer: This is very interesting from Randgold Resources. Now, Randgold is headed by the South African-born Mark Bristow. He has now stolen a march on South Africa when it comes to mechanisation. In fact, they are going into a new high-tech era in Loulo, which is in Mali. Already, the operations are remotely controlled by a person sitting in an air-conditioned cabin underground. They are now going to move that person to surface. In other words, we will get like the Scandinavian and Australian countries where people don’t even go underground to control the operations. These will be controlled from surface where they will mine gold in a big way using self-guided haulage trucks and all sorts of other underground automation, which is a big new high for technology in Africa. Nowhere else in Africa have they got this and they are even ahead of South Africa now. The big buzz word is called tele bogging. Tele bogging is the remote controlling of the operations underground, which seems to be well known in Australian circles. People now opting to run mines like they run factories and almost become commodity manufactures rather then miners.

Kamwendo: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly, he’ll be back with us at the same time next week.

 

 

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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