SAIW Member profile: GENMAC
Customised, specialised, high-quality manufacturing from GENMAC
African Fusion speaks with Keegan Govender, QA Manager at GENMAC (Pty) Ltd, about the niche, customised manufacturing and con- struction solutions offered by the company’s ISO 3834-2 certified facilities in Richards Bay, KwaZulu-Natal.
K eegan Govender, the Quality Assur- ance Manager of GENMAC (Pty) Ltd, studied Mechanical Engineering, specialising in structural design. “Before I joined GENMAC, I was at a local Titanium Dioxide plant, also as a quality manager, but with additional responsibilities on the ecology side,” he tells AF. He also holds an Outcomes-Based Assessment qualifica- tion from the Assessment College of South Africa, Welding Inspection Diplomas from SAIW in SANS 347 & PER Regulations, and for the Overview of ISO/SANS 3834 Part 2 course. In 2002, GENMAC opened its Fabrica- tion Workshop facilities in Richards Bay. Together with Directors Govy Govender, Keelan Govender and the rest of the Team, the company strives to maintain its mis- sion statement: ‘To uphold and maintain a leading reputation by providing a quality service with the highest levels of profession- alism, integrity, honesty & fairness to all stakeholders’. A niche customised offering “The good thing about our business is that it is so specialised. We perform Fabrica- tion work on large structures, such as fur- naces, pontoons, barges, pressure vessels,
cranes, and convey- ors, to meet the needs of minerals-handling and mining supply companies, including the Richards Bay Coal Terminal (RBCT), Rio Tinto, Sandvik, Met- so, Tronox and many
A dredger manufactured and supplied for suctioning material from rivers or sea beds and sending heavy mineral concentrate directly to processing or separating plants.
that pressurised vessels are used to trans- port the titanium-rich, heavy material to shore. “There are two ways to transport mined material to shore: using a conveyor system or by loading the material into a pressurised vessel and then transferring it to shore via a pipeline,” he says. “The barges we manufacture are fully equipped. The small one for Madagascar is 8 meters long and 4 meters wide. It has a full set of on-board hydraulics, a small crane, a skipper’s chair, propulsion systems, con- trols and a rudderless Z-drive propeller for manoeuvrability. It’s a purpose-built vessel for servicing floating mining plants,” he points out. An interesting larger version was also manufactured for Senegal and delivered towards the middle of 2025. The 15×8 m barge had to be delivered from the Rich- ards Bay facility to the Port of Senegal and then 21 km overland to the mine, passing through a residential area with an access limit of 6 m. So we had to manufacture the barge in two sections for transportation, then send a crew up there to weld the sec- tions together, pressure-test it and float it to the mine’s pond. “That barge is also equipped with two back actors, which are used to hold the barge to the shore during loading or un- loading, and an on-board crane for loading and offloading pumps and anything else required for the plant,” says Govender, adding that “every application is different, so all of our work is uniquely customised to best suit the designs and needs of the plant and the customers’ requirements.” “GENMAC has been specialising in barge
more, including cross-border companies. Increasingly, though, a lot of the work passing through GENMAC’s Richards Bay workshops is for local and cross-border clients. He cites a recent success story for maintenance barges for a mineral sands operation in Senegal and Madagascar: “These are used to service the mines’ float- ing plants, which are pumping mineral-rich sands such as Ilmenite (FeTiO 3 ) from the ground. “We build the floating mainte- nance barges for moving equipment from the shore to the floating plant and back to shore,” Govender says. This work involves significant structural fabrication, including plate work for the wa- tertight hulls. “We also make conveyor sys- tems, piping, safety walkways and stacking solutions for floating plants, pontoons and the barges that service them,“ he adds. On the pressure-vessel side, he says
A GENMAC-manufactured and supplied barge equipped with two back actors, a crane for loading and offloading plant equipment, a full hydraulic system and a Z-Drive for propulsion.
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March-April 2026
AFRICAN FUSION
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