The mining industry continues to face an up cycle, as demand for metals is fueled by emerging economies and initial signs of recovery from developed regions. With this shift in demand, commodity prices have held steady or are rising across the spectrum of base and precious metals.
With the rise in demand, come the key challenges of, increasing productivity and reducing costs. In aggressive companies, existing operations are being driven to maximize their capacity and extraction from existing assets and resources. Meanwhile, those that have been afforded the available capital, are looking for access to new reserves or expanding into new territories.
Despite these balancing actions, the industry is facing the compounding impact of several factors that make it more difficult for companies to match demand. In the immediate horizon, the cycle time and investment in online supply is being significantly shaped by increasing government intervention, barriers to new permits and licenses, increasing environmental stewardship requirements, inadequate remote infrastructure, the cost and integrity of the supply chain, limitations in management processes/systems, and shortfalls in skilled labor.
Given the cyclical nature of the mining industry, the current supply gaps and prices have producers focused on growth, generating sufficient cash, or ensuring a strong borrowing position during the market peak to survive the inevitable market trough.
Brooks International Experience
Our experience in mining spans across multiple projects, in ten countries, and on four continents, with a variety underground and open pit operations extracting gold, diamonds, coal, lead, copper, zinc, bauxite, bitumen, phosphate, lime and aggregates.
Across this landscape, our end objective has been to increase profitability and optimize the value of the mines and processing operations, while enhancing their safety, yield efficiency, and community standing. In practive, meeting these objectives has required addressing customer and community relations, customer service, maintenance, contractor management, energy consumption reduction, organizational design, operations and support productivity, working capital management, government regulations and the supply chain.
Brooks’ client footprint includes leading mining companies, support contractors, and their suppliers.
