MechChem Africa March 2017

43 / 48

⎪ Products and industry news ⎪
Access specialist boosts workforce
The increase in workers is a sure-fire indication of sus-
tained growth at the rope-access specialist, Skyriders,
which still derives 75% of its workload from the South
African market.
“Themajority of our targets that we set for the busi-
ness weremet and, in a few cases, exceeded. Our focus
going forward in 2017 will be to consolidate what we
achievedduring the latter stageof 2016,” says Skyriders
marketing manager, Mike Zinn.
Electricity utility Eskomremains amajor client, with
Skyriders enjoying an ongoing scope of work at both
Medupi and Kusile Power Stations, as well as at the
Ingula Pumped Storage Scheme. Another major source of repeat work has been
various projects for Sasol.
The big challenge for Skyriders in previous years has been the quiet winter
months, during which time there is little opportunity to undertake any regular
maintenance work at the power utility. This trend was finally broken in 2016, with
an extremely busy winter for all Skyriders’ clients.
“Newandoldclients areexperimentingwithour alternateaccess serviceoffering
inorder to assistwith theirmaintenancebudgets, which arebeing stretched further
as cost-cutting and lacklustre economic growth bites,” Zinn explains.
Skyriders offers a variety of rope-access aided services to numerous industries,
such as power generation, petrochemical, mining, heavy industry and facilities
management. Current services include non-destructive testing (NDT) and inspec-
tion, concrete inspection, maintenance and repairs, application of coating sys-
tems, working-at-height safety systems, welding, and confined-space rescue and
standby.
Afrivalve’s new premises
Afrivalve, the specialist sales division of the eDART
Group, recently moved into new, improved and ex-
panded premises. The continued growth in sales and
extended range of valves supplied by Afrivalve made
the move into larger premises a necessity.
Gregor Hopton, group marketing manager for
Afrivalve comments: “In the past 18months, Afrivalve
has been engaged in more project work, which led
us to look for premises that could accommodate our
operations and stock holding. As we are now selling a
greater number of large diameter knifegate valves (up
to DN800), space became more of a priority, and we
believe our new facilities in Kya Sands, Randburg, will
fit our sales and manufacturing requirements.”
“Our new premises will give us the ability to cen-
tralise our sales team and to assemble the C-Tech
Knifegate and RedRoc Pinch valves that are currently
manufactured at eDART’s facility in Jet Park, east of
Johannesburg. We are very excited about our expan-
sion, as it means we can service and supply our clients
evenmoresmoothlyandefficiently,”concludesHopton.
Afrivalve was launched in 2015 in order to further
expand the eDART rangeof products so that complete
packages could be offered and thus newmarkets cap-
tured. Afrivalve recently became the official distribu-
tor of the Gemü Valve and Control Systems range for
the mining and metal refining sector in Africa.
Rapid rigging and derigging.