Australia’s largest wire rope supplier WRI industries has been playing an ever-growing game since the 1920s, building a business from the BHP empire to become the largest supplier in the country, and thanks to a fortuitous buyout, the world.
Australia’s manufacturing industry cops a lot of bad press, and in focussing on stories about companies going bust due to managerial stagnation and waste, we forget about the success stories, the companies holding their own and continuing to press forward in productivity and innovation.
With the fall of Arrium last month, the mining industry would do well to acknowledge a business that arose from the BHP and the OneSteel empire, which will continue to thrive thanks to good management and sound investment: WRI Australia.
WRI Australia is the most successful wire rope business in the nation’s history. Dating back to its first rope produced for the mining industry in 1926, WRI has gone from strength to strength, streamlining operations to maximise efficiency over the past 90 years.
Until 12 months ago, WRI (Wire Rope Industries) was owned by the Arrium Group. The recent purchase by one of the world’s largest producers of wire and other related products, Belgian company Bekaert, may have saved the jobs of 100 Newcastle employees at the WRI factory.
At present, the chief claim to fame of the WRI business in Newcastle is the fact that it produces around 90 per cent of the wire rope used in the Australian mining industry. That’s ropes for draglines and shovels, ropes for cable-hauled conveyors, crane ropes and lifting gear, not to mention the structural ropes produced for engineering projects in other sectors.
A world-leader in the manufacture of drags, hoist ropes and pendants for draglines, as well as the shorter pendants for shovels, WRI’s is a story of successful management, of changing with the times in order to meet the needs of industry.
In its heyday as the Australian Wire Rope Works, a fully-owned subsidiary of BHP from 1933 onwards, the Newcastle factory produced many different wire rope products, and employed up to 450 workers at any one time.
Today the Newcastle factory, still with original art deco brick frontage, produces only 30 different products for the mining industry, and employs 100 people. Good management and top-class approach to safety made the company an attractive buy for a multi-national looking to take over the world’s wire rope business.
Baekart has all but monopolised the world’s manufacture of this important consumable, as late last year the Belgian manufacturer announced plans to merge with the largest wire rope manufacturer in the US, Bridon, to form a joint venture which will be named the Bridon Bekaert Ropes Group.
Meeting Australian needs.
With original BHP pedigree, WRI is primarily about mining supply, specialising in new-technology ropes that will last longer in the field.
Chief among the products manufactured in Newcastle are the plastic infused wire ropes, which were designed specifically for the mining market, to suffer the extremes of heavy use.
One of the key advantages of plastic infused rope is that it is impossible for dirt and rock chips to become embedded between the rope wires, where the intrusion can cause excessive wear and weaknesses in rope strands. The plastic coating serves as a barrier against contaminants and foreign bodies, which is especially important for shovel hoist ropes, which are exposed to contaminants in operation.
The other major benefit is that the impregnated plastic prevents the kind of wear that occurs within dynamic ropes, which are designed to be repeatedly put under load and strain, creating movement and wear between the wires. The impregnated plastic helps to retain the natural balance of the rope by locking strands in place to minimise the movement of component strands and wires during operation.
In addition, the plastic coating provides a smooth surface to pass over sheaves and drums, preventing nicking as well as wear to the sheaves, where a great deal of the outer wear on the rope occurs.
Each of these benefits adds up to a doubling of the expected operational life of each rope, which represents a significant saving when a single shovel pendant sells for around $20,000.
WRI also ensures additional levels of safety are built into the pendant sockets in a technique that ensures failure of the connection is impossible. By passing the rope into the socket, splaying out individual wires and filling the void with molten zinc, the safe working load of the connection is ensured to be greater than that of the rope.
WRI also specialises in long distance cable-haul conveyors, where resistance to corrosion is important to keep maintenance costs down, as is the number of splices in the rope made to achieve long distances.
According to WRI general manager Stuart Callender, Australia is home to one of the largest populations of overland conveyor systems, for materials handling from mines and loading facilities to ports.
“They take long continuous lengths of rope, so we took the opportunity to invest in machinery capable of achieving that. Those ropes are just under 10km long, and we make them in parcels of around 120 to 130 tonne.
Manufacturing the ropes in such long single lengths precludes the need to splice smaller ropes together, which would create unnecessary points of weakness in the rope.
With export markets in China, South America and South Africa to name a few, around 10-15 per cent of the total production from WRI in Newcastle goes overseas.
The success of WRI as Australia’s premier wire rope business is grounded in manufacturing experience dating from the 1920s, evolution and continual development of manufacturing techniques, and ongoing investment in technology, as well as service to the customer.
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