Equipment surplus leads to Web project (11/03)

It seems possible to buy just about anything over the Internet.

A Sudbury-based company has added things that might be a tough find on EBay, such as mining and mineral processing equipment. Minesource is the brainchild of Mark and Matt Alexander who developed the company's www.minesource.com Web site.

"We're trying to reach a global market," says Mark Alexander. "Rather than just reach Northern Ontario, we're trying to reach elsewhere where (the mining industry) is booming such as South America and all over the world.

We're trying to cast a net out there to pick up a wide audience."

The company stemmed from their father's company Mindecom, a mine-decommissioning business also based in Sudbury. As part of the mine-decommissioning process, they would end up with used mining and processing equipment.

"We had that background and all this equipment and we needed an outlet for it," he says. "We would have that equipment, as well as lists of other dealers throughout the world. We were always getting calls asking for

equipment model XYZ and we would have model ABC. We would end up calling around until we could find

model XYZ and so we got to know what was out there. We thought, why keep this to ourselves when we could put it on the Internet to let other people know what's out there."

Alexander says Minesource will act as a broker for the final deal.

"We help buyers and sellers find each other," he says. "We have agreements that say they won't try and circumvent this process because there will come a time when people will want to see this equipment before they buy it. Most people are fine with that. It's a standard process in the industry."

Alexander says a drop in metals prices and in revenues has caused many companies in the past to consider going through the used-equipment route to equip new mine start-ups. Some of the sales have even been of vintage equipment that requires only a little refitting and repairing before it can go into active service in a mine.

"You can get equipment that is 50, 60, 70 years old and, with a few repairs, will be in service even longer. This equipment, with a little maintenance, can stay in service that long; the technology doesn't change that much.

Fifteen years is not long in the life of this kind of equipment," he says. "You can have machines that, after a few

repairs, with a few seals replaced, come back 98 per cent of what it was when it was new."

Alexander says it is not unusual for companies to purchase used equipment for only a few hundred thousand dollars, that new would carry a price tag in the millions.

He says the company has been fielding calls from all over the world. Some of the deals they have brokered have

been international.

Alexander says the company still has some problems to deal with, particularly crossing language barriers. Plans are in the works to translate the Web site pages into languages such as Spanish.

Neither considers they are charting any new courses for the mining world, but the Minesource Web site is more of a natural extension of what the company was doing previously. The Web site went online in January, but it has been in the development phase for almost two years.

"There's quite a bit involved in this. It did not happen overnight," he says. "We're not just selling pumps or crushers. We have to know everything. It's quite a large variety of equipment you have to learn both underground and milling."