Taking over a foundry that has not been melting or manufacturing castings for a lengthy period, relatively speaking, is not an easy task. Concorde Foundry Vereeniging has a history dating back to 1966 when it was established by the Apex Group, a group with many different engineering manufacturing entities, the foundry had a very good reputation for high quality castings. Level one BBBEE company SAFRail and NRE(a US-employee owned company servicing clients in the rail, marine and power industries) acquired the foundry in a shareholding partnership.
With the acquisition it was important for us to retain the services of certain key employees, some of which have over 20 years of experience with the foundry. Our vision is to do as much of what was done before, and more, to keep and improve on this reputation of high quality.
We believe in building relationships with our customers and suppliers since we are aware and appreciate the effort and sometimes investments in equipment, processes and people that can be required in order to supply specific and unique products. This is strongly related and especially important when considering the pillars of quality, price and delivery.
There are three different production lines in the foundry and all are related to the size of product. The green line caters for castings between 1 and 30 kilograms and the blue line for castings from 30 to 150 kilograms. The third line is where we do floor castings and this caters for castings between 150 and 3 000 kilograms. The current capacity of the foundry, with the currently commissioned furnaces and production lines, is 400 tons per month.
Besides the normal foundry operations that are required, we also provide other services like patternmaking and product development, we also have a heat treatment facility and relatively large machining shop. This includes CNC machines, some big European origin vertical and horizontal borers and milling machines.
We service both locally and internationally, we have many years of experience in the rail transport industry and we are certainly investigating opportunities in this area. But of course, we are servicing other mining and general engineering clients as well.
The word "Infigo" in Latin means "impressive". It reflects our company's intention to do business in a way that suppliers and customers will be impressed through their experience of quality, loyalty, integrity, commitment and service.