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Cheating death down below

FEW ISSUES in South African mining are as contentious as the debate on the prevention of deaths underground.

The country’s Department of Minerals & Energy (DME) is currently reviewing safety legislation, and stricter regulations are expected to be forthcoming. That’s good news for Shane Thompson, founder of Ilips – SA’s only locally-owned supplier and installer of underground communications equipment, a niche market dominated by a few international heavyweights.

Thompson expects that over the next 18 months the DME will gazette legislation making magnetic marker field technology on heavy underground equipment, which eliminates crushing accidents, compulsory.
 
Magnetic marker field transmitters – called HazardAvert – alert miners to danger areas around heavy machinery and can slow or stop the machines if workers are in a position of imminent threat. Ilips is the sole supplier of HazardAvert technology in SA and is in a prime position to benefit should the DME follow the international example and enforce the use of magnetic markers.

“Adoption is happening in SA already but at a slower rate than we’d like,” says Thompson. “However, cost is the biggest barrier. I think it pays for itself if you consider the $7m/day losses a mine will incur once it’s forced to close after an accident.”

Thompson founded Ilips – short for Industrial Lifting Instrumentation and Pump Supplies – five years ago as a distributor and installer of underground radio systems, closed circuit television networks, tagging and tracking devices as well as real time operations data systems.

Thompson attended a technical high school in Zimbabwe and trained as an electrician but is mostly self-taught. He founded a process instrumentations business at age 30, following several years as a commissioning engineer in various African countries on behalf of Ramsay Engineering. The business was sold to a German-owned competitor, Becker Mining Systems.
 
Ilips started out with just two employees in a single location – Evander, in Mpumalanga – due to a restraint of sale clause following the Becker deal. Over the past five years it’s grown to 106 employees in four key mining regions and services mining companies such as Gold Fields, Anglo American [JSE:AGL], Xstrata, Exxaro Resources [JSE:EXX] and Rustenburg Platinum.

The focus is strongly on coal: 90% of Ilips-supplied products are used in coal mines.

Its current concentration is on growth opportunities further afield in Africa, particularly in Mozambique’s fast-growing coal mining sector. “Witbank is about to reach a ceiling with coal mining. Every¬thing that can be developed has been developed,” says Thompson. Ilips plans to extend its relationships with South African-based mining companies to projects further afield in Africa.

“Our motto is local people with local talent,” says Thompson. “But the lack of skills available in the areas we operate in is a huge problem. Government should have stronger incentives for local businesses to develop skills: most young black professionals get snapped up by a bigger company as soon as they’ve been trained.”

- FinWeek
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