Mining’s old guard needs strong medicine
A new report details subpar investor returns in the mining industry over the last decade, particularly big cap diversified companies which have not adapted to new realities.
Recent Index by TNW (The Next Web) ranked Finn-co ZYFRA Oy 11-th among the TOP-50 2018’s world aquisition deals in IoT. The 10th position took Google with its aquisition of Lytro, the Dutch camera maker.
Finland based biggest digital solutions vendor ZYFRA announced it started its acquisition of VIST Group, one of the industrial leaders in development and implementation of information technologies for digital mining earlier in autumn this year . The M&A deal accounts for $30M. Through acquisition (the one will be finished by 2020) of these assets the company is planning to occupy a significant share of global market and to compete with Catarpillar, Komatsu and other majors in certain aspects.
“The market still lacks a clear leader, which leaves the doors wide open for the up and coming challengers like ourselves”
“Our view is that there’s a tremendous opportunity for disruption in Industrial IoT and applied AI space, although it is still a nascent market to a larger extent – said Ilkka Saarinen, Sales Director of Nordic markets at ZYFRA Group. If you look at Gartner latest Magic Quadrant for IIoT platforms, you can quickly arrive at the conclusion that the market still lacks a clear leader, which leaves the doors wide open for the up and coming challengers like ourselves”
The company, founded in November 2017, currently operates in Finland, China, Russia, Bulgaria, and India, and its platform connected over 7,000 CNC machines across the countries. By the end of 2018 more than 200 production facilities are equipped with its products. The company has announced its plans to enter markets of Indonesia, Mongolia, South Africa, Vietnam and Chile as early as 2019-2021. ZYFRA has reached $30M revenue in first year, facilitating industrial manufacturers in-house and abroad with AI and IoT based solutions as well as autonomous vehicles.
“Smart manufacturing (the term refers to IoT and AI) is projected to grow noticeably in the 3 to 5 years. Recent surveys showed 92% of senior manufacturing executives believe that “Smart Factory” digital technologies such as artificial intelligence will allow them to improve their degrees of productivity and empower their staff to work more intelligently. Some even account for smart manufacturing market volume to increase to over $320 billion by 2020,” said Mr. Pekka Viljakainen, ZYFRA Group Chairman of the Board.
“Finland has brought SMS, 5G, and the Linux operating system to the world. You can even find Finnish sensors on Mars. Moreover Helsinki has already given birth to a handful of explosive companies, such as Rovio and Supercell. The startup hub is quickly growing its influence in the SaaS and B2B ecosystems with companies like Smartly, Nosto, Wolt and Smarp, to name a few.
Especially in the past 10 years, Helsinki, like other European startup hubs and hotspots, has become a breeding ground for innovation. Now, when everywhere in the world manufacturers are preparing to shift to an Industry 4.0, to master new production mode driven by Ai and IoT technologies, Finland has something to offer. The “economy of knowledge” is quite tolerate to a geographic and scale attributes of companies this makes us feel sure of technological solutions for heavy industries we develop and our prospects at a global scale,” – Saarinen added.
By now the company offers global market its Real-time machine data collection system MDCplus that can be used to track jobs, operations, work centres, scrap, costs, downtime and
people. It also provides its clients with Industrial AI-solutions that can either predict quality and product properties, or recommend process settings and material usage.
The company is applying cutting edge data science combined with industrial expertise to provide end-to-end solutions for optimizing production speed, quality, and costs for industries such as machinery, metallurgy, oil and gas and mining.
