17 CDE Global made its presence felt at the MENA Mining Show with a large pavilion and Ruchin Garg, regional manager, MENA, said the focus was on its new Combo materials processing system.
one. This is more a show where the equipment for the mining and quarrying sectors is specifically discussed. So that makes it the show for us.” The most popular CDE equipment in this edition is proving to be the new Combo, and Garg adds: “A lot of discussions are happening around developments in Saudi Arabia, which we see as promising. Phosphate is something on which we have a fair degree of expertise. Here we met people form Jordan and KSA in this regard. Another specialty of ours is iron ore. People with low grade ore from the region have come to us for material processing and washing solutions”. Gold mining is another segment from where CDE saw a lot of people, with prospective clients from Africa, where the company has a couple of plants, says Garg, adding: “As a company we always treat waste as a resource and in mining our focus is mainly on the mineral waste. Gold generates a lot of mineral waste. We go in and tell customers how they can benefit from this waste, that it can now be treated as a product.” Another exhibitor of note was Epiroc, the Swedish manufacturer of breakers, hammers and other mining and quarrying attachments. Ambe Che, director for the MENA region, says: “It’s a very good platform for us because we have met most of our key customers and discussed pertinent issues. And we also showcased some of our new hammers for the down-the-hole applications in our range, which is impressive. And we are getting into new fields and new markets, especially in Jordan and Saudi. It was great that we could meet with a couple of key players in those markets. “We are showing off new models at this how. They are the M6, M7 and M8. So, we are bringing in our M-series to this region for the down-the-hole hammers. Technically, these are our new hammers that offer better performance for our clients. In the next few months we will be promoting this new series here in the GCC and also in the MENA region as a whole. We see a definite demand for it in this region.” At specialist heavy mining and drilling equipment maker, Vermeer, infrastructure projects were the focus. Alain Gebran, area manager, Saudi Arabia, explains: “We manufacture heavy equipment mainly for infrastructure projects. It’s a very niche product range; our equipment range in the GCC consists of trenchers used for pipeline construction jobs and horizontal drilling machines which are used when you cannot open cut the ground or road, so you drill beneath it and pull the pipes. Our products find great use in applications such as laying small fibre optic and telecoms cables to electricity and going all the way to water, sewage and oil & gas pipelines - basically all infrastructure projects. “Our customers are mainly contractors who pick up the government contracts and tenders. Some of the large projects in the GCC region where our machines can be found working are the Riyadh Metro project and installation of water pipelines in the Saudi capital. In the UAE, the horizontal drilling machine is our most common machine. It is the one that installs pipes and cables without having to dig open the ground. In Saudi and Qatar the trencher is our most important machine.