23 March 2018 – Johannesburg: After more than three decades of product evolution and advancement in its emulsion offerings, South Africa-based explosives leader BME is subsuming its well-known brands such as HEF, and Megapump under the name of Innovex.
According to BME Ammonium Nitrate based Products, Equipment’s and Services Product Manager Dr Rakhi Pathak, the motivation for the name change is mainly to accommodate the steady expansion of the company’s markets globally – as well as to reflect the technological developments and diverse solutions within the product range.
Having grown steadily from its origins in 1984 on the strength of a new cold emulsion technology, BME earned its early reputation in the opencast mining sector – where it remains the South African leader. Since then, through continuous investment in technology and research, its emulsion products have been developed to suit many specific applications. A range of other offerings in packaged products and electronic detonation were also evolved by BME, many of which now hold market leading status. BME’s cold emulsion product, HEF (Innovex) remains the backbone of the company’s technology that supports the non-electric and electronic systems.
“We have retained a steady focus on innovation and customer service across the company, which has allowed us to grow throughout Africa and also into Australasia, south-east Asia and South America,” said Dr Pathak. “We are now gearing up to enter north American markets, and the time has come where we need our global brand to be streamlined and easily identified.”
From its dominance in South African opencast mining – where specialist emulsions were developed for conditions such as reactive ground – BME took its emulsions further into underground applications.
All these now fall under the Innovex brand, which will continue to drive the company’s strategic imperatives of safe mining and user-friendly products. The popular HEF 100 becomes Innovex 100 while emulsions such as HEF RG and HEF ARC become Innovex RG and Innovex ARC respectively.
The same applies for BME’s underground offerings Megapump Lateral and Megapump Uphole, which are now labelled Innovex™ Lateral and Innovex Uphole. In the packaged product range, for instance, Megamite Super and Megamite Plus become Innopak Super and Innopak Plus, while Panex becomes Innofex.
“These names have been trademarked in our primary markets,” she said. “The new brand also encompasses our environmental focus, based on our innovative use of used oil in our emulsions, giving customers the opportunity to cost-effectively dispose of – contaminated oil without threatening the environment.”
