The Hazemag-allmineral group has been at the forefront of offering support to India’s coal mining and minerals sector. Chiranjib Banerjee, Director, All Mineral Asia Pvt Ltd-Hazemag spoke to Construction Business Today about his company’s products, the feedback from customers at IMME and business prospects going forward…
Give us an understanding of your company’s role in supporting the mining and mineral industries?
As part of the Hazemag-allmineral Group we are known internationally for providing products and solutions for crushing of coal as well as beneficiation of minerals. While the Hazemag brand provides crushing solutions for coal as well as other minerals – in India we are mainly focusing on coal crushing – allmineral is one of the pioneers in the mineral beneficiation sector. We have supplied for iron ore application, iron ore beneficiation to a lot of plants in India like Jindal Steel, Bhushan Power, Bajrang Power and Steel, KJS Ahluwalia and many others. On many occasions we have provided complete engineering solutions as well as supply of key equipment. We have the capability of providing complete turnkey solutions in India to the mineral sector. Coming to IMME after every two years is a great opportunity for us to update the industry on what we have done, showcase our latest products and services, and new technologies and applications from all over the world. It is not only in India, we are working all over the globe through plants in Australia, U.S., Europe and the Middle East.
So how has the mood at the exhibition been?
At exhibitions such as IMME we always look forward to having interactions with our old customers as well as the opportunity of meeting new clients who could be thinking of a new project. In the last two years the mineral sector has not been growing the way we want but we always feel there is scope. Being a very sector-oriented service provider we do feel that we may not be able to reach each and every corner of the country to meet different type of client, but IMME provides a nice platform for us to reach out to various kinds of people and to offer our services or take some inquiry or interest forward. We have had some good initial discussions with representatives from the biggest coal beneficiation company in India. They are looking for support in coal handling – it is a 15 million ton coal beneficiation project – which they are planning. Hopefully things will move forward in times to come but it normally takes about two years to get materialized.
What are your expectations from this event?
Our expectations from this show is as usual: which is to get some quality inquiries which will be converted soon, say within a period of one or half years. That’s because normal beneficiation projects take at least one year and more to decide and then the process gets started.
Tell us about the equipment and solutions offered by your company?
From the Hazemag side we basically offer a crusher for coal. The machine acts as a primary crusher and after the first crush we are able to convert from 1 metre or 1.2 metre size of full boulder to less than 100 millimetre. In allmineral it’s beneficiation. Once the crushing of the load is done, whether it is a coal iron-ore or manganese or bauxite then we separate the impure part from the pure part. So, we upgrade the mineral from the low-quality material available within the ore. That is what we call beneficiation and in this there could be a number of processes it could be crushing, grinding, and then upgradation through gravity separation. So we have entire solutions for that. Though we don’t manufacture all the equipment required for the beneficiation process, we have the capability to provide the complete solutions. It is up to customer to decide to take all the equipment from us as a supplier or they can choose different supplier from another company for products which we don’t manufacture.
So what do you manufacture?
We manufacture equipment called beneficiation Jig for gravity separation – it is used for particles from 1 millimetre and above. Then we also produce another equipment called allflux which is also a gravity separation equipment but used for very fine sized products normally from 0 to 3 millimetre particles. Then we have magnetic separator which is used for separation of particles of magnetizing and non-magnetizing nature to improve the quality of iron-ore. These are the major equipment used.
Apart from these what are the other solutions offered by your company?
We offer technical audit solutions which allow for the study of a plant’s current condition. After the assessment we give them technical suggestions on how to improve their plant operation and efficiency by either raising equipment efficiency or process efficiency. Whether it is mechanical, electrical, instrumentation or process engineering – which is an integral part of every beneficiation or mineral processing plant – we have complete engineering and after sales support for whatever the equipment or process we supply. That’s what we offer from India.
Since you mentioned crushing let me ask if are you also offering support to the road construction sector?
No, the equipment we are offering is not for aggregate crushing business. We are not into the construction sector but we have equipment for limestone crushing. Normally limestone is not used in India for road construction, it is used for cement sector. Hazemag is a world leader in limestone crushing but in India we are still not very much present with our brand because we are not manufacturing that particular range of products in India, it is imported. The capacity of our equipment available for limestone crushing is very high, starting at 500 ton and above. So until and unless there is a very high capacity market requirement we will not be competitive.
Tell us about your manufacturing plants?
Our global manufacturing is done from our plant in Germany. In India we do our manufacturing from Trichy at our group company’s facility owned by Sinoma, a Chinese giant specializing in cement manufacturing and design and engineering process plants.
Are you looking to expand your facility keeping in mind market demands?
At this moment the infrastructure we have is good enough to cater to Indian needs. We are also at the same time providing a lot of support to our group companies in Germany by offering them engineering support, then plant commission support and after sales support. We are not immediately looking for any expansion in terms of upgrading the infrastructure or man-power because the market condition is still not that high that we increase capacity of anything. Let us just say we are well-positioned to cater to the present needs. If there is a need to increase capacity we can do it at any moment.
How do you see the way ahead?
Iron-ore is one of the major minerals which has not been in very good shape over the last two to three years, the reason being that in 2020 there are a lot of iron-ore mining leases which will be expiring and the government will have to soon come up with a new policy. We are therefore expecting some policy decisions which if taken early can provide us some guidelines of how the future of the mining and mineral sector is going to be. That is the one thing keeping us on our toes. We don’t know how the market will behave yet but we do expect the scenario to improve soon and are optimistic for business.