Last week, Supply Side wrote about the deal that is likely to bring real balls to blasting operations worldwide. This week it looks at the company providing the finance, contacts and management smarts to help make that happen.

For Blast Movement Technologies’ co-founders Darren and Diane Thornton, the deal to give a majority stake to Jolimont Global Mining Systems was a logical one. It gives them some return for their efforts but also gives their company strong management and links to international contacts.

BMT makes a blast monitoring system that includes spherical sensors, a device to find them and software to analyse the results.

For Jolimont Global, a joint venture between technology investor Jolimont Capital and resources-focused private equity firm Resource Capital Funds, it was only its third deal.

RCF is the major provider of funds into Jolimont Global and while it has been a major funder of the mining sector it has not really invested in the technology side. Hence the tie-up. In very simple terms, Jolimont Global brings the technology analysis smarts and RCF provides the funds.

As far as it is aware, Jolimont Global is the world’s only METS-focused investment company.

Jolimont Global managing partner Lex McArthur said the company’s research had turned up a Santiago-based fund that focused on the copper industry in Chile and a Canadian fund that dabbled in some METS areas among other technology investments.

However, it appears Jolimont Global is the only one that focuses purely on METS.

“The mining industry outside Australia, South Africa and Canada is not really seen as sexy,” McArthur said.

“We had an information session in Silicon Valley and technology companies came in. They were surprised at the size of the mining sector.”

Jolimont Global has only been around about 18 months and its implementation director Lyle Bruce said it was formed to bring capital so METS players could become bigger players.

He said the firm was also interested in the implementation of technology.

That means perhaps taking some technologies from research establishments and getting it to market.

Besides BMT, Jolimont Global has invested in Perth-based paperless site app APE Mobile and Canadian underground mining electronic safety and automation product maker Newtrax.

In July, Jolimont Global announced that it and Viburnum Funds had led a $2 million capital raising for APE Mobile.

APE had actually been looking for $1.5 million but ended up with access to $2 million.

Bruce said the BMT deal was about 12 months in the making and also involved its part-owner Resource Capital Fund tipping in some additional funds.

“The mandate we set out with was that we recognised that mining productivity improvements would be driven by technology,” he said.

“Mining is pretty slow at implementing new technology. We want to make a difference to that.

“We want to aid the rapid take up of technology.”

The timing is apt. Dotted throughout the results statements from Australia’s miners are statements about how mining initiatives and productivity improvements are going to drive performance in the years going forward.

But where are those productivity improvements going to come from?

Australia already has a very healthy METS sector. So healthy, in fact, that the Australian government named METS one of its five industry growth centres.

The METS Growth Centre is chaired by Elizabeth Lewis-Gray, a co-founder of Ballarat-based mineral processing and recovery specialist Gekko Systems.

In some ways the health of the Australian mining sector has proved an impediment to the global growth of METS players.

McArthur said the Scandinavian countries had little mining to speak of locally so they had been forced to sell their technology globally.

That explains the strength of the likes of Atlas Copco and Sandvik.

Bruce, who will be chairing the BMT board, has had particular expertise in getting technology to market.

He was with slope stability radar specialist GroundProbe and learnt early on that selling the technology was not the way forward.

GroundProbe came out of the University of Queensland and has since grown to a global business owned by a private equity player.

Initial efforts to sell the technology met mostly blank looks and deaf ears.

However, when they started to explain the ability of the technology to predict pit wall failures and get people out in time the reception changed very much to the better.

“One of the fundamental things is you have to understand their problem and solve it rather than sell them the product,” Bruce said.

He said technology providers also had to work at different levels – at the mine site level and at the technology group level.

“You have to teach the companies what the technology can do for them,” Bruce said.

METS providers also have to offer product support and service.

“When we first started with GroundProbe we put a few radars on site and thought that was it,” Bruce said.

“But then the clients said they wanted us to operate it. You have to offer the complete package.

“To go to the next level and become a global organisation and supply the big guys you have to be able to show a stronger presence and talk to the market.”