South Korea is a growing nation, and the key for any nation’s growth lies in its infrastructure development. But in South Korea, the lack of high quality raw materials is limiting the development potential of its infrastructure, such as the railroad network, commercial and non-commercial buildings, and industrial hubs, and thus the growth of the entire nation.
Tae-hyung Enterprise, established in 1976, entered the quarrying business after securing a big order from Hyundai Engineering and Construction in 1984. The company expanded its operations and the quarry business was made an independent unit in 1995. The company operates in four locations across South Korea and has its own asphalt plant, a ready-mixed concrete plant, quarrying business, industrial recycling business and architectural stone works. Its major products comprise asphalt concrete and ready-mixed concrete. The company has an annual turnover of about $USD100 million ($AUD133 million) and employs 200 people at its four plants.
Tae-hyung produces and suppies not only aggregates and crushed sand for the South Korean market but also ballast for high speed railways. Tae-hyung adopted a new method to produce aggregate by crushing because the extraction of gravel from rivers was banned, and transporting raw material from the sea escalated the cost considerably. The raw material Tae-hyung uses to produce aggregate is one of the hardest stones in South Korea. The abrasiveness of the raw material is about 1340 grams per tonne, so it is a challenge to manufacture aggregates from this material.
Improved end product
“The local equipment failed to give us the desired result with the raw materials we were using, so we decided to go with Metso’s Barmac B9100SE VSI crusher,” Tae-hyung’s CEO Ho-joong Yoon explained.
The installation of the first Barmac VSI immediately cut the flakiness of the material in half to a mere 20 per cent. Soon after, this positive experience encouraged Tae-hyung to place an order for Metso’s Nordberg HP300 and HP400 cone crushers. The Metso cone crushers enabled Tae-hyung to further reduce the flakiness down to 10 per cent and to increase the overall production, which gave the company the opportunity to earn more.
Reducing the flakiness to less than 10 per cent changed the course for Tae-hyung and put an end to the poor response for its product. No customer has since turned down its products, thereby paving a path of success for Tae-hyung in the aggregates business. The most surprising outcome, however, was the increased production, which more than doubled after installation of the equipment. Earlier, the company was producing about 700m3 of sand and about 1500m3 of gravel per day, but the installation of the Barmac VSI and the HP cones enabled the company to double its output. It now produces between 1600m3 and 1700m3 of sand per day, and it easily surpasses 2000m3 of aggregates daily.
“The rocks we crush have very high compression strength – ranging from 121 megapascals [MPa] to 141 MPa – so machine wear increases the downtime,” Ho-joong Yoon said. “However, the robust quality and strength of the Metso equipment is much better than that of local machines. We are reducing operating costs by 10 per cent to 15 per cent.”
The increase in production, combined with the increased acceptance rate from customers, has helped Tae-hyung to increase its overall profitability by 15 per cent. The company can now sell sand at $AUD18 per cubic metre tonne, compared with the industry average rate of $AUD13 per cubic metre tonne – 40 per cent more than the market price. Even though the local machines were available at a lower price than the Metso equipment, Metso’s solution proved to be more profitable for the operator.
Source: Metso