Magnetite company explores South Africa

Its key strength is the application of strong business acumen in identifying and pursuing innovative opportunities and trying to do things efficiently and economically.

Osho Group has emerged as a leading new entrant in South Africa's commodity trading and mineral resource development space through its sustained efforts to create an improvement. Its expertise includes exploration and mining, beneficiation, trading, shipping and logistics, and marketing.

Osho Group has offices in South Africa, Australia, India, Madagascar, Malawi, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. In South Africa, Osho Group is developing iron ore projects in the Limpopo and North West provinces.

With its Thabazimbi vanadium-bearing titano-magnetite deposit, it holds a resource base of approximately 300-million tonnes in Limpopo. Exploration activity continues to increase the resource base substantially.

Osho Group has acquired a stockpile of almost 10-million tonnes of magnetite with a current arising of 25 000 tonnes a month in the North West province.

This material is supplied to cement producers across the country. Currently, the group is working on setting up a pig iron facility with magnetite being the primary feedstock.

The group regards sub-Saharan Africa as one of the most attractive regions for growth in the global cement industry. It has identified six geographical locations in southern Africa to build cement grinding plants, with the first expected to be commissioned in the second quarter of the 2014 financial year.

It has also been awarded licences for limestone in several African countries, including South Africa.

Further to this, Osho Group is paving the way for the export of low-grade coal from South Africa. This coal is typically unusable by Eskom. It remains the only company in the country that exports low-grade coal recovered from discarded material.

The benefits of marketing a part of the country's 1.5-billion tonnes of discarded and off-specification coal that companies have left un-mined, include earning valuable foreign exchange, providing direct and indirect jobs to thousands, a lowering of South Africa's carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide footprints, and releasing 4 000 hectares of land that otherwise be used to hold the discarded material.

Osho Group has dedicated rail and port allocation for this export initiative and is targeting yearly coal exports of 10-million tonnes by 2017, a considerable increase from the 1.2-million tonnes of 2011.

Just as with its iron ore operations, Osho Group has been investing in coal exploration and mining projects with a view to increase its resource base.

These exploration projects include coal projects in KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and in the Springbok Flats coal field of the North West.

Osho Group has introduced recycling technologies for a waste tyre collection scheme in South Africa. Its first facility is expected to be commissioned towards the end of the current financial year in Richards Bay.

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