Capital Equipment News January 2017

Road Milling’s core business is the rental of milling machines for the rehabilitation of asphalt and concrete roads.

PREMIUM PAYS SUPERIOR DIVIDENDS Over its 17-year existence, Road Milling and Sweeping has carved itself a niche rental business to become the largest privately-owned operator of milling machines in South Africa. With a clear understanding that the success of a business of this nature largely depends on machine uptime, the company has vested its trust in premium Wirtgen milling machines over the years, a decision that is continually paying dividends, writes Munesu Shoko .

98% of the company’s cross-border work is through the South African contracting fra- ternity working elsewhere in Africa. Sticking to core business Over the years, RMS has stuck to its core niche business of renting out milling machines, but with a few other value adds such as lowbed trucking services, road sweeping, tippers and water carts. The company now owns its own three lowbed trucks used mostly for transporting its rented milling machines to sites, but these can be outsourced to any other customers in need of lowbed trucking. However, Kafka says sticking to the milling business only is a difficult decision from a strategic point of view. “We ask ourselves whether we need to stick to our niche or diversify the business,” says Kafka. “Diversification has got its own pros and cons. Sometimes you become too thinly spread. Ours is a capital intensive busi- ness, so to diversify you need to invest huge amounts of capital into equipment. Diversifying is also a bit challenging in the sense that all of our people are focused on milling; our operators know how to mill and are not versed with any other work,” reasons Kafka. But, Leigh Cameron, financial manager at RMS, believes that if ever the decision to expand the product portfolio is made, the immediate possible and closest option would be recyclers. She believes that recy- cling is aligned to what the company does and will allow it to continue dealing with the very same customer base. RMS reports increased demand for its

F rom humble beginnings back in 1999 with a single Wirtgen 1000C milling machine, Road Milling and Sweep- ing (RMS) today owns a strong 21-unit fleet of milling machines, making it the single biggest privately-owned operator of such specialised gear in South Africa. Founded by Cecil Aling and a business partner at the time, today the family-owned business is being steered by two of Cecil and Glynn Aling’s three daughters, Leigh Camer- on and Lesley Kafka, who share their father’s passion for anything mechanical, but with a premium taste, of course. Over the years, RMS has supported the Wirtgen brand for its milling equipment needs purely driven by the understanding that though premium calls for premium capital outlay, the returns, in the long run, are massive.

Road Milling’s core business is the rent- al of milling machines for rehabilitation of asphalt and concrete roads. The company operates on a national basis and has re- cently successfully completed cross-border contracts. “We work all over South Africa in terms of the milling work we do. In the past year, we have done quite a lot of cross border work,” says Lesley Kafka, general manager of RMS. “We still have ongoing work in Lesotho that will pick up in 2017. We have also worked in Namibia, Botswa- na, Swaziland and Malawi.” Kafka foresees increased cross-border work moving forward as most of the South African civil contractors spread their wings into the rest of Africa for greener pas- tures. This is considering that most of the cross-border contracts RMS has are with local South African companies doing work outside the country. According to Kafka,

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