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May 2017
MODERN MINING
33
feature
CRUSHING, SCREENING
AND MILLING
crushing and screening solutions
Top:
A jaw crusher designed,
manufactured and installed
on a coal mine by B&E
International.
Above:
Erection of a plant
designed and manufactured
by B&E International.
Above left:
A B&E Interna-
tional crushing plant on a
copper operation.
for the equipment upfront. The capital value of
the plant is built into the rate-per-tonne that is
charged and B&E International runs the plant
for an agreed period while the capital portion
is steadily paid off.
“The advantage for the customer lies not
only in having us carry some of the start-up
cost, but in also having the assurance that the
plant will function effectively as a vital part of
the production process,” he says. “Ownership
can then revert to the mine after the capital is
repaid through this toll fee. The customer can
even decide to buy out the residual value of
the plant at an earlier stage if their cash flow
is good and they are confident of their own in-
house expertise.”
Word-of-mouth is traditionally where B&E
International’s business comes from, as its cus-
tomers move between different commodities
and mining companies; most of its work is cur-
rently in diamonds, copper, coal and gold.
“It’s all about partnership really,” Janse van
Rensburg says. “For instance, we started a con-
tract with one of our diamond customers in
1993, and we are still in partnership with them.
On the coal side, we were called in by one of
our early customers for a six-month contract,
and we are still there many years later.”
The usual scale on which B&E International
conducts mining is up to about 500 000 tonnes
per month, and it also engages in the develop-
ment phase of projects by doing the stripping
and mine preparation.
“On a copper mine, we can build the heap
leach pad and manage that, and then the mine
takes over when the material enters the metal-
lurgical stages and the final recovery of copper,”
he says.
With its mining work mostly in South Africa,
Botswana and Namibia, B&E International is
also exploring opportunities in countries such
as the DRC and Sierra Leone. The company’s
familiarity with moving crushing plants around
the continent comes mainly from its previous
crushing contracts in various African countries
including Uganda, Tanzania and Mali.