Modern Mining December 2019

feature BULK MATERIALS HANDLING This conveyor, manufactured by NEPEAN in South Africa and exported to Australia, feeds a biomass boiler.

NEPEAN offers full turnkey service for conveyor systems

conveyor systems business in Finland, a transaction which included nearly 200 000 m 2 of manufactur- ing operations across Germany, Brazil, Australia and Finland. NEPEAN Conveyors ranks as one of Australia’s most successful suppliers of conveyor and materials handling solutions and the South African company is intent on following in its footsteps and already has some impressive installations under its belt. These include many underground trunk conveyor systems with capacities of up to 4 500 t/h and drives in the megawatt range. Recounting the history of NEPEAN in South Africa, Niemandt says the South African company was established in 1995, with its original focus being on the sale of OEM equipment such as winches, belt maintenance equipment and the patented BOSS coupling. “More recently, and in response to the weak market for conveyor components, we decided to go beyond sales and design and move

A company which is fast making inroads into the conveyor field is NEPEAN Conveyors, based in Roodepoort near Johannesburg, which can offer a full turnkey service – from engineering through to com- missioning – to organisations needing conveying solutions. Modern Mining recently spoke to the company’s General Manager, Willem Niemandt, to learn more about its product and service offering.

N EPEAN Conveyors in South Africa is part of Australia’s Nepean Conveyors , which itself is a division of the NEPEAN Group, which was founded in the 1970s by David Fuller, a toolmaker by trade who started in business with a small machine shop. This has since grown into one of Australia’s leading privately owned engineering, mining services and industrial manufacturing organ- isations, with over 1 200 employees and a global footprint. In 2017 NEPEAN acquired Sandvik’s con- veyor components businesses and the specialist

28  MODERN MINING  December 2019