A leading productivity partner for the mining, infrastructure and natural resources industries, Epiroc which branched out of Atlas Copco, offers cutting-edge mining products like drilling rigs and machines for rock excavation. The company has state-of-the-art factories at Nashik and Hyderabad, and a world-class engineering centre in Bangalore.
Anirban Sen, Business Line Manager (Underground Rock Excavation) and Sujeet Kumar, Business Line Manager (Surface and Exploration Drilling), Epiroc Mining India Ltd offered Shrikant Rao perspective of emerging opportunities in the mining equipment business.
As a company formed especially with focus on the mining sector how has the frontier opened up for you during the last few years?
In the coal segment one has not seen much movement or growth. For sure there has been a lot of news on paper in terms of introducing amendments in the rules to bring foreign players to India but nothing much has happened on the ground. Despite the current economic situation as far as our equipment and product lines are concerned, we have not been affected. There has been no negative reflection on the business. There are not many underground metal mines in India. Hindustan Zinc is the largest player in that segment and they have been investing consistently for the last many years. Hindustan Copper too is awarding a lot of contracts for development with the result that contractors are buying a lot of machines for them. There has been a little bit of jump in the business from iron ore but not to that extent that the industry would have liked. We don’t see very high growth from limestone mining because all the cement plants are running at 60 per cent utilization.
Everything is connected. So if a project picks up you get limestone, you get iron ore, you get steel and so on.
What are the products which form Epiroc’s mainstay and the ones you launched at Excon?
We did not launch any new products at Excon 2019 but showcased all the standard products that we offer in the construction and mining market.
To name some of Epiroc’s main products it includes the Drill Jumbo Boomer L2D hydraulic and semihydraulic machines — AirROC D40sh and AirROC D35sh.
Further we also offer a range of small-to-medium-to-heavy breakers as well as rock drilling tools line including Top Hammers, Down the Hole and Rotary Drills.
The surface drills and hydraulic breakers have been improvised to give extra advantage in terms of saving on fuel and productivity. Then we also have the Minetruck MT65 which is a high-capacity underground truck, engineered with smart features to ensure productivity in larger underground mining and construction operations.
Tell us more of the Boomer L2D.
It’s an underground drilling machine called which is a very popular model in use in Indian infrastructure and in neighbouring countries like Bhutan and Nepal. We were earlier manufacturing this product in Sweden. In December 2010 we took a call to move the production to India and in December 2011 launched the first product manufactured at our Nashik plant – this was mainly for the Indian market, to be sold only in the country. At the beginning of 2015 our head office decided that India would be the only production centre for Boomer L2D and base for our global exports. Contractors have enjoyed a lot of benefits from its use such as a dramatic increase in productivity due to a faster rockdrill and back up received from 75kW power packs.
How do you view 2020 in terms of opportunities for business for your company?
In 2020 we don’t anticipate any problems for the underground segment. Mining has great potential and we have a big plan for exploration. At our Nashik plant we have added more underground products and the market response to them has been very good. According to the market situation, we will include more products going forward. From the point of view of market opportunities, there are many infrastructure projects which are in the pipeline. For instance, there is a big tunnelling project coming up in Uttarakhand near Rishikesh. It is an RVNL job involving 160 odd kilometres of tunnelling work which will keep us busy. There are many traffic tunnel projects and hydro projects in neighbouring countries like Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. We see a lot of action there. On the surface drilling side we have already hit bottom and started reviving. With the Government of India’s focus on infrastructure development there are a lot of projects being implemented, and if liquidity is managed, we do not foresee any problems for the equipment industry. We are very optimistic for business going forward.