TERANGA GOLD CORPORATION
A Golden Generation for West African Mining
Exploring opportunities and enriching a region
For the past eight years, Canadian mining company, Teranga Gold Corporation has aligned its own growth to that of the booming West African exploration and extraction industry, not only edging its business towards mid-tier status, but simultaneously weaving itself into the local fabric of the region.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Richard Young founded the Company back in 2010 alongside Chairman, Alan Hill following the latter’s identification of untapped potential, and the former’s acknowledgement that West Africa had become one of the fastest growing areas for gold production in the world.
“The Governments in the region were and are mining friendly and they have a strong mining code. West Africa is open for business,” Young affirms and recalls, looking back to the Company’s inception in the area. “Initially we came across the opportunity to acquire the Sabodala Mine by virtue of a previously explored mineral sands opportunity by an Australian company who found gold along the way.”
Teranga - meaning hospitality in Wolof, the most widely spoken language in Senegal where Sabodala resides - was born, and the rapidity of the Company’s growth since then has been remarkable.
During the initial phases, more than 100,000 ounces of gold were produced on an annual basis, but this figure has since risen to more than 200,000 ounces each year; epitomised by last year’s record 233,000 ounce achievement.
“All told, this results in around 1.4 million ounces having been produced a Sabodala,” Young says. “What we’ve since been able to do is leverage the cash flow of Sabodala in Senegal and use it to expand into two other
Mincon West Africa is the key supplier for all the DTH and Top Hammer drill string components and rock drilling tools to Teranga Gold at the Sabodala Gold Operations mine in Senegal. Martin van Gemert, Managing Director of Mincon West Africa, applies his 30 years of experience in the industry to identify and meet the needs of his customers, with the backing and support of the Mincon Group PLC which was founded in 1977 in Shannon, Ireland.
Mincon manufactures a wide range of precision engineered hard rock drilling tools for various industries including mining, exploration, waterwell, geothermal, construction, horizontal directional drilling, oilgas and energy. Mincon Group PLC has a global presence with strategically located offices and manufacturing plants across the globe.
All of our products are manufactured in our own plants and we have a well-developed supply chain which means we can get Mincon products in a timely and cost-efficient manner to our clients’ sites, wherever they are.
Mincon invests in state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities and has a programme of continuous updating of manufacturing equipment at all of our plants to ensure the highest quality and performance of our products. This performance is achieved through the close tolerances used in our manufacturing, special heat treatment processes, and superior designs and has led Mincon to have proven itself superior to others in the market and continue to outperform the competition in the field, where it counts.
The design and manufacturing of Mincon Products is carried out in multiple locations across the world.
Our manufacturing plants:
• Mincon International – Ireland – DTH
hammers and bits
• Mincon Rockdrills – USA – DTH bits • Mincon Rockdrills – Australia – Reverse
circulation hammers and bits
• Mincon Rotacan – Canada – Rotary drill
bits, drill pipes and adaptors
• Marshalls Carbide (a Mincon Group company) – UK – One of Europe´s leading tungsten carbide specialist manufacturers supplies top quality products to our bit manufacturing plants.
Mincon group PLC recently acquired Viqing Drilling Equipment in Sweden as well as Driconeq AB in Sweden and South Africa, expanding its abilities to manufacture and supply top quality drill pipes and accessories to its ever-widening customer base.
Through definite lines of communication between the manufacturing and the sales divisions of Mincon Group, results from testing and feedback from the field is relayed back to the design and manufacturing teams. This ensures that any concerns or improvements, that our customers feel can be made, are dealt with within a short timeframe.
We pride ourselves on listening to what the end users of our products tell us, which feeds into new product design. This has led us to become “The Driller’s Choice Worldwide” and our superior quality products can be found on job sites all over the world.
www.mincon.com
countries - Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso - via the development of our Wahgnion project and a forthcoming expansion programme at Golden Hill.
“As a result, we’re now poised to capitalise on an organic growth pipeline that will take us to mid-tier producer status over the next few years.”
The combination of Sabodala, Wahgnion and Golden Hill alone is projected to take Teranga’s annual production rates past the half million ounce mark, and that’s before its Afema project in Côte d’Ivoire progresses over the coming years as well.
Young enthuses: “We all do a good job here in West Africa but Teranga stands out on two major fronts. Firstly, we have developed expertise mining multiple deposits. We turned a simple single deposit at the Sabodala mine into a multiple deposit site feeding into a single mill, showcasing how good we’ve become with grade control. In fact, we are doing about 20 percent better than our reserve models and this gives us confidence to embark on other multiple deposit projects.
“And secondly, our approach to CSR in West Africa is a major advantage.
It’s a focus from the top down.
It’s a special philosophy, which is fundamental to the way we operate.”
Adding value to the local economies
This latter point encapsulates Teranga’s evolution in a region that was always ripe from an industrial perspective, but which required a sound corporate social responsibility strategy to succeed. As such, Young recalls that the business has always focused on sharing the benefits of responsible mining with all of its stakeholders, with its core mining expertise simply following suit once these pivotal initiatives were in place.
“We always see ourselves as a guest in our host countries,” he notes. “We appreciate the opportunity to come in
and work and our mission is to make sure that we leave these communities better off than when we found them.
“If you look at Senegal initially, for example, Sabodala had a nonSenegalese general manager in place at the time of the IPO and 10-15 percent of the workforce were expats. Our response was to immediately put in place a local general manager and to reduce the number of expats to just five percent. We now have Senegalese in very high positions and they’re a key component of our team.”
Teranga has won numerous awards for its CSR-centric ethos, addressing over the years aspects of health, education, community development, nutrition, water scarcity, SME support and skills enhancement.
“Inevitably what ends up happening from this latter personnel perspective - and it’s the nature of what we do - is we train them and then they eventually leave. People from Dakar will come here to be trained and then move back with their newly acquired skills to turn them into very good employment opportunities,” Young explains.
“But we understand that, and it’s actually our goal. It all comes back to ensuring that these communities and individuals - and therefore the country - is better off. Whether they’re in mining or any other activity, they come away from Teranga with improved skill sets and go on to add value to the economy.
“It’s always as much about societal facilitation as it is about company or industry development.”
A very attractive proposition
Proof of this model’s success is the ongoing prevalence of its operations, which continue to thrive under the guidance and stewardship of Teranga’s almost entirely local workforce.
In identifying such prospects to begin with though, Young aims much of the plaudits towards his geology team who have turned nascent or
underexplored opportunities into sustainable success stories.
Young details: “What we’ve been able to do in a few cases is assess work that had been previously carried out by juniors and see what might be possible with a successful drill bit. And this has laid the platform for the success we’ve enjoyed across a number of acquisitions or joint ventures, as the geologists correctly anticipate not just what’s currently available in each case, but what’s possible too.”
And naturally, as Sabodala has blossomed in status, Teranga’s standing in the wider industry has escalated; subsequently paving the way for its expansion into Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire.
The contributory factors culminating in this operator-of-choice position are innumerable of course, but Young once again pinpoints the Company’s expertise and considerate philosophy as being chief among them.
“We have a culture where we
treat everyone with respect and that goes for the local communities and countries in which we operate, as well as our employees, contractors and business partners,” he states. “As a result, we are becoming a company of choice for both partners and workers.
“Importantly though, people see what we have achieved and how quickly we’ve achieved it. They’ve witnessed our organic growth and our ability to move beyond one asset within a relatively short timeframe.
“So if you’re one of these prospective partners, or employees or contractors, you can look at Teranga and think “if we do a good job here, then another project will come up soon that we could be involved in as well”, and that makes us a very attractive proposition.”