In a recent survey by Timetric’s Mining Intelligence Center (MIC), mine managers were asked to specify where procurement decisions for heavy mobile mining equipment were made. The choice of answers included at the site, centralised within the country, centralised elsewhere within North America or globally outside of the region.
The majority of North American miners were choosing to make decisions at the mine site. This accounted for approximately 65% of all final decisions. Following the mine site, final decisions were commonly centralised within the country, which accounted for 25% of actions.
This differs with other global mining regions: e.g. in Africa, Asia and Latin America only 40% of decisions are made at the mine site. Looking forward, over 28% of respondents predicted more centralisation over this period for all categories, while less than 12% of respondents indicated that ‘centralisation’ would decrease in any category. The majority of respondents do not anticipate any change, which indicates that North America is stable in terms of procurement centralisation.
“In other mining regions, notably Australia, we saw a trend towards greater centralisation, due in part to many miners reducing costs across their operations via central contract negotiations. However, we are not seeing this trend as strong in the US, which still prefer to handle most decisions at the mine sites. For instance, the data revealed that close to 90% of precious metals purchasing decisions are still made onsite, hence a supplier to precious metals mines is best advised to continue their relationship with onsite personnel. This information is particularly useful for companies that supply mining products and services because they can use this to determine where marketing efforts are best made,” commented Clifford Smee, Senior Mining Analyst at Timetric’s MIC.
Edited from Press Release by Harleigh Hobbs