Fox Marble Holdings PLC (LON:FOX) Chief Executive Officer Chris Gilbert caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the installation of their new CNC machine as well as the block vacuum pump at their factory in Kosovo
Q1: This morning we saw an announcement regarding the installation of a new CNC machine, can you tell us what this means for Fox Marble?
A1: Yes, we’re very excited about this machine. The technical description is that it’s a state of the art 5-axis Computer-Controlled Numerical machine capable of cutting basically slabs, or indeed even small blocks of marble into all sorts of different shapes including tile, tile manufacturing and cut to size jobs. That’s the final piece of the jigsaw in our factory which allows us to do all of these jobs from beginning to end.
So, we take a block of marble out of the ground from our quarry, we cut it into slabs and then, subject to the design that we’re being asked to produce the material to, it goes through this CNC machine. It comes out of this highly automated, sophisticated, computerised machine that’s also very fast so, if we were just producing bog-standard tiles of various dimensions, the rate of production is such that it can cut more tiles in a year than our factory can produce slabs from which to make these tiles and our factory is geared up to produce in excess of 445,000 square metres of slab marble a year. So, that’s a very exciting piece of the equation for us.
Q2: You’ve also added a block vacuum pump, can you briefly outline what this does?
A2: We have. Some blocks have micro-cracks or fractures in them, barely visible to the naked eye but when you put them through the gang saws and the slabs come out, you can see them in the slabs. What this machine does is it allows us to apply resin to the block and then it’s put in this machine and it’s under vacuum such that the resin is sucked into these micro-cracks so that they don’t exist anymore.
This has two effects, the first is that our customers care about these things, one block is identical to another block and therefore there is no depression, or the value of the block is not compromised in any way. It also allows them to put them through their gang saws without having to resin the block themselves which is a saving in a cost to them as well as time and it just makes it more attractive.
This increases the yield in Fox Marble’s quarries significantly so there’s no distinction between one type of block and another type of block.
Q3: So, you’re effectively strengthening and repairing the blocks that would’ve been sold for less and increasing the yield. What kind of percentage increases are we talking about though?
A3: We were talking about this the other day and we think that this improves our yield in the quarry by 20% and that would be a sort of fair proportion of what we could point to as being blocks that we could now successfully trade as if they were a grade A block. So, it’s significant, it’s material for us.
The other thing it does is that when you push them the gang saws, whether we do it in our own factory or whether our customers do it in their factory, it allows it to go through with much less resining that takes place before it’s polished. Again, this is all very attractive to people who obviously have a margin to consider and a cost base to care about.
Q4: Now, you mentioned that these additions will provide additional capacity to meet increased demand, what is it that’s driving the demand do you think?
A4: It’s basically Fox Marble’s activities that we’ve been very focussed on over the last 18 months to 2 years where we have been marketing our material very hard in those parts of the world where the volume businesses is available, for example, in India we’re in a situation now where we cannot get the stuff out of the ground fast enough to satisfy demand that we’ve created. The same is true in Turkey where we’ve got very very large customers who are very keen on two or three of our materials and our job now is to just obviously increase production and produce as much material as we can to take advantage of this.
It also allows us to not just successfully pitch for cut to size jobs of the type we’ve been doing, for example, here in London at Lillie Square or with Chelsea Creek or with Fulham Reach. These customers are St George’s Homes which is a division of Berkeley Homes and Lillie Square is a Capital and Counties development, I think it’s the largest development in Europe and we’re providing these jobs with cut to size material.
In fact, our machine, the first job that it did whatever it was, was for a series of different sized tiles for a mansion in South London where the material is being installed into, I think it’s 5 bathrooms plus a common parts lobby area and a kitchen/dining area. That’s three of our different types of material that’s going into this and this machine sort of whizzed through this material in about a day ready for it to be packed and shipped out which gives us great flexibility and obviously great speed of response and again, satisfying the demand that we’re creating for our stone.
