REGIONAL REPORT | AFRICA
OUT OF AFRICA
The lifting industry, and the lifting challenges, are as varied in Africa as anywhere else. Julian Champkin reports.
It has, though, its own long-established manufacturers, who themselves export cranes and lifting gear; and its own long- established service companies, who have both the equipment and the expertise to carry out the heaviest of lifting operations. Manufacturers include RGM Cranes, who make overhead cranes and hoists in Benoni in South Africa’s East Rand. RGM has recently opened a new branch in KwaZulu, Natal, to add to their Rustenburg and Durban office and their service locations throughout the country. Morris Material Handling, also based in Benoni, is Africa’s largest crane company, making and supplying electric overhead travelling cranes, wire rope hoists, jib cranes, chain hoists and accessories. Morris was recently
A
frica has too frequently been thought of solely as a market for exporting to, receiving goods and services from elsewhere.
awarded the tender to design, manufacture and install a 100-ton engineered crane at the Vanderbijlpark steel mills of ArcelorMittal South Africa. Vanderbijlpark Works is one of the
world’s largest inland-operation steel mills. It has two blast furnaces and three basic oxygen furnaces. Production capacity is around seven million tonnes of liquid steel per annum; the company supplies over 60% of the steel used in South Africa and exports the rest to sub-Saharan Africa. The new crane, serial number M10284,
is a 37m span double girder, heavy duty slab handling machine. The slab tong fitted to the crane will be capable of handling varying sized slabs with a capacity of up to 100 tons. Operating at the hot strip mill, the crane will handle high volume of slabs and is critical to continued production at the mill. To ensure the crane is capable of feeding the mill at required production
rates it will hoist at 9 m/min, cross travel at 70m/min and long travel at 100m/min; control is from a bridge mounted cabin. The completed crane will weigh in excess of 220t. Condra, headquartered in Germiston, has a manufacturing pedigree going back more than 50 years and claims the highest local content of any African overhead crane supplier south of the Sahara Desert. It also exports worldwide. Mining, of course, is an African – and especially a South African – mainstay and mining applications account for more than half of Condra’s orders, from customers across sub-Saharan Africa and also in the Americas. Those orders are met by production at factories in Johannesburg and Cape Town. (Condra’s European market is served by a subsidiary company in Bulgaria.) A recent Condra project has been at the
Platreef platinum mine near Mokopane in Limpopo Province, South Africa. Platreef has been under development since 2020 by Ivanplats (Canada-based Ivanhoe Mines’ South African subsidiary). Production, scheduled to begin this year, will tap a 26-metre-thick flat ore body extending over several kilometres to deliver 12 megatons per annum over a lifespan of three decades, which will position Platreef among the largest platinum group metals (PGM) mines in the world. Annual yield is expected to exceed one million troy ounces of palladium, platinum, rhodium and gold, plus useful quantities of nickel and copper. The mine itself consists of two vertical
Africa has its own long-established crane manufacturers that provide for domestic as well as export markets. © Sunshine Seeds /
Shutterstock.com
30 | April 2024 |
www.hoistmagazine.com
production shafts, a ventilation shaft, a concentrator, and associated supporting infrastructure. Condra has delivered electric hoists, two overhead cranes and a number of chain blocks to the project. The electric cranes, of single-girder and double-girder overhead configuration,
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