Few companies can provide a dedicated team-led approach to decommissioning like Optimus. The Aberdeen-based oil and gas engineering consultancy has gone from strength to strength since it launched Optimus Decom in 2010, a subsidiary established to meet growing demand for its engineering services for the decommissioning of on and offshore oil and gas facilities.

Tarcon is a private Harare-based company with operations throughout southern Africa, active in Mozambique and Zambia as well as its home market in Zimbabwe. It employs over 800 people. Although the company formally began operations in its present form in 2001, its foundations go back to 1981 and Tarcon was the result of the merger of a number of earthmoving, plant hire and later, civil contracting companies.

It was during the 1990s that professionals from Antofagasta Minerals Group made the discovery of a new deposit in the Sierra Gorda mining zone. Though it was accepted from the off that developing such an asset, located at the heart of the driest desert in the world, would be a hugely challenging undertaking, the work of thousands of people has contributed to the transformation of a geological resources into a new mining company called Minera Esperanza.

Based in Vancouver, Atico Mining Corporation focuses on finding and developing mid-size high-grade copper-gold deposits in Latin America. The company was floated on the Toronto Stock Exchange just over a year ago by a team that has long and successful experience in the region and includes several members of the Ganoza family which is very much involved in Fortuna Silver which has operations in Mexico as well as their home nation Peru.

The first several months of 2012 were optimistic times for the potash industry, with a recent acceleration in world demand for the product showing no initial signs of wavering. What we now know is that a number of combining factors in the latter half of 2012 would conspire to negatively impact upon the potash market.

Eighty years ago, back in 1932, Air Parts International Sales Inc. started serving the needs of commercial aviation customers worldwide by providing a complete range of aircraft materials, services support and ground based equipment. “Not every business can say they’ve been around that long,” says API General Manager, Michael Peter Balwan, Jr.

According to a regulatory filing by shareholder Yahoo, which holds a 24 percent stake in the company, Alibaba’s net profits for the three months to December 2012 rose to $642 million from $237 million the previous year. Meanwhile revenues were more than 80 percent higher during the same time period.

 

Anyone with an eye on the travel industry will see that there has been a lot of activity around Air Mauritius in the last year and that it has begun to make ripples that will get it noticed even by its biggest competitors. The fact is that Air Mauritius is not simply a regional airline but one that flies each week to four continents and is punching way above its weight in the global industry.

The MTConnect standard facilitates data collection vital for meaningful analysis of machine tool behavior. In 2007, a group at the Association for Manufacturing Technology (AMT) led by Paul Warndorf realized the need for a comprehensive standard to address the inability to collect data from manufacturing equipment. That was six years ago and various machine tool builders and controller manufacturers functioned as islands of automation, requiring proprietary methods to access their data.