Boring To Depth

Master Drilling’s innovative track record and project experience means it is well-positioned to contribute to, and benefit from, the mining industry’s transition to automation and mechanisation.

- Simon Anderssen

Mining services companies are often tarred with the same attributes as their customers: significant commodity price risk and highly cyclical earnings. Yet there are a handful of service providers that are able to generate a stable earnings stream during the most challenging commodity cycles. We consider Master Drilling one of these few.

Master Drilling is a global drilling solutions business specialising in raise bore drilling. It listed on the JSE in December 2012 and raised R430m. The capital has been used to expand capacity by designing and building new raise-boring machines.

Since then, the company has delivered consistent earnings growth during one of the most severe commodity cycles, in which aggregate earnings of the JSE Resource Index declined 70%.

Master Drilling generates 80% of its revenue from raise boring, a method of mechanically boring a shaft between two levels. The method has a number of advantages over the alternative approach of blast sinking using explosives, being less labour intensive, safer and significantly faster and cheaper. A raise-bored shaft can be completed in approximately half the time and at 30% to 40% reduced cost versus conventional methods of sinking a comparable shaft.

It is used in mining for ventilation shafts, ore passes or access shafts; in civil construction for underground tunnelling, metros or infrastructure projects; and in hydroelectric plants for pressure shafts. Master Drilling is active in each sector but the majority of its exposure is to mining.