Market pressures drive new thinking at belt makers

London – With the business outlook remaining tough for suppliers of material handling equipment, the major players are looking to cut costs and/or develop technologies that add value to their offerings in mining, energy and other industrial markets.

Setting the scene, a 14 Jan trading update from London-based Fenner plc reported an increasingly challenging environment for its Engineered Conveyor Solutions (ECS) division, which includes the Fenner Dunlop and related product brands.

In response, Fenner is to rein in costs, postpone spending and increase its focus on margin control at the ECS division, which supplies conveying technologies to the global mining, power generation an bulk handling markets.

“Against a continuing backdrop of global mineral oversupply and correspondingly low commodity prices, any recovery in our ECS markets continues to be deferred,” said the Fenner statement.

Demand levels in the Americas are stable, albeit at low levels, anticipated growth in EMEA has not been achieved and margins continue to decline in Australia as a result of customer-driven price pressures.

The gloomy outlook was confirmed by Claus-Peter Spille, head of the Mining World segment at ContiTech, who said: “The worldwide mining industry has been in a slump for months due primarily to decreasing raw material prices. This is one of the reasons that many mining companies are not investing as much as they did five or ten years ago.”

The ContiTech manager also pointed to political and economic uncertainties in regions such as Russia, Ukraine or Brazil, which are important markets in the mining world.

“Mine owners have to deal with these changing circumstances, and we do not expect that the mining industry market will recover in the short term,” Spille said.

ContiTech does, however, hope to benefit from increased efforts to save energy and from the further expansion of automatation in the mining and conveyor belt industries.

“With that in mind, Conti-Tech has developed and produced energy-optimised conveyor belts and automatic monitoring systems which help mine owners reduce costs and be more efficient in production,” said Spille.

Also extending its technology portfolio is Bridgestone Corp., which is set to launch a newly developed system capable of automatically assessing conveyor belt wear.

Checking wear usually involves measuring the belt at various points, which requires temporary system stoppages and associated production losses.

Bridgestone’s new Monitrix software-based system uses a sensing and communications technology that enables automatic measurement of belt thickness through sensors embedded in the belt.

Results are transmitted to a data-collection system to allow monitoring of wear conditions without stopping belt-conveyor operations, the company said.

As well as minimising production losses attributable to system stoppages, the new technology eliminates manual measurements, potential errors associated with manual data entry, added Bridgestone.

The Bridgestone Monitrix software also facilitates management of the new wear monitoring system.

Another strategy is to target growth sectors of the energy industry, as seen at Yokohama Rubber Co. Ltd.

The energy industry’s expansion into the world’s coldest regions, such as the Arctic region, has increased the need for extremely cold climate conveyor belts.

In response the Japanese company is to begin full-scale marketing of its conveyor belts built with specifications suitable for extremely cold climates.

The product launch is part of a Yokohama strategy for capturing demand from the ‘natural resources development market’, according to an 11 March company announcement.

The belt, which was originally developed for oil sand mining sites in Canada, is said to feature a “superior balance of low-temperatures and impact resistance.”

Yokohama has now decided to launch global sales of the product under the brand name Iceguard AR. Negotiations, it said, are currently being held with potential users in cold regions around the world Yokohama said it already supplies conveyor belts for use at oil sands mining sites in Alberta, Canada. The company manufactures conveyor belts at two plants, one in Japan and the other in China.