MECHPROTECH: Built in Benoni, Bound for the World
South Africa’s mining and minerals industry is home to some of the world’s greatest innovation and industrial progress. Equipment manufacturing business, MechProTech, is taking that pioneering thinking global as it expands across two new continents. Director Evan Bird and Manager Kennedy Maputla tell Enterprise Africa more about reliability, sustainability, and expansion.
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In South Africa’s deep and challenging mining industry, mediocre has never been good enough. The sector is one where downtime is measured in lost millions and equipment failure can halt entire operations, the companies that earn lasting reputations do so through one thing above all else: the quality of what they build. MechProTech, headquartered in Benoni on the East Rand, has spent more than two decades earning exactly that kind of reputation — designing, manufacturing, installing and maintaining the minerals processing equipment that sits at the heart of beneficiation plants across Africa and beyond. With an ambitious target of R500 million in annual revenue by 2027/28 and new companies being established in Australia and Canada, the business founded as a small consultancy in 1998 is moving into a new era.
South Africa’s mining sector is providing the momentum. Mining production rose 4.6% year-on-year in January 2026, with platinum group metals, chromium and manganese among the leading contributors — maintaining the recovery trajectory that has seen consistent growth over consecutive months. The industry is valued at around R1 trillion and supports 470,000 employees across the country. The Minerals Council has entered 2026 with clear intent, embedding predictive safety and health systems and partnering with members to ensure the sector remains competitive and sustainable. For a company like MechProTech, whose equipment processes the ore that drives those production numbers, the industry’s trajectory is a direct tailwind.
The company’s story begins with Darrel Tonkin, who started the company in 1998 as a consultancy providing equipment designs. Evan Bird joined alongside Patrick Bellingan in 2005, becoming shareholders two years later. Both are mechanical engineers who came through the Goldfields programme, and their arrival marked the beginning of a transition from consultancy to full original equipment manufacturer. The business moved from Kya Sands to Benoni, and by the time Tonkin emigrated to Australia, the vision of a serious OEM was already taking shape.
“From 2013 to 2022, I ran the company, growing it substantially and organically,” Bird explains. The next inflection point came with the appointment of Fernando Monteiro as CEO in 2023, brought in initially as a consultant on engineering and process metallurgy. Tonkin himself returned to support the fledgling Australian operation — a fitting full circle for the founder whose original vision is now being realised on a global scale.
The group structure that has evolved from that journey is built for growth. MechProTech is the holding company, owning Mech Fit and Turn, the fabrication division, and Combaflex, the rubber lining division. “We are currently in a growth phase, on an upward trajectory,” says Bird, highlighting a product portfolio that spans the full range of minerals beneficiation activity, an established African footprint, and a growing international presence that is starting to attract attention from mining jurisdictions far beyond the continent.
PRODUCT AND PROCESS
The equipment that MechProTech designs and manufactures covers five divisions: comminution, hydrometallurgy, classification, materials handling, and modular plants. At the front end of any beneficiation operation sits comminution — the crushing, milling and scrubbing that reduces raw ore to a processable form — and it is here that MechProTech has built some of its strongest capabilities. The company produces its own range of ball mills and scrubbers, handling up to 1,000 tonnes per hour, operating up to 1MW, and delivered as modular, platform-mounted units that are manufactured and tested at the Benoni facility before dispatch. “This equipment is the heart of a beneficiation plant,” Bird says. “Within 10 days of equipment leaving our site it can have material flowing through it.”
That speed of deployment is a deliberate design choice and a commercial differentiator. The modular approach — building, testing and commissioning in the workshop before shipping — dramatically reduces on-site installation time and the associated cost and risk.
Behind the comminution equipment, MechProTech supplies thickeners for densification of material and water recovery, tanks with mixers, elution plants, reagent plants, and modular tank farms capable of handling 300 to 400 litre tanks in combination systems. The company’s approach to reagent tanks is notable: “We rotate tanks for reagents, we don’t transfer, which improves efficiency,” Bird explains.
At the classification and screening end, MechProTech has developed a range of large barrel screens and trommels for mill discharge, alongside horizontal screens, incline screens, pan feeders and grizzly feeders.
The materials handling division adds another dimension: apron feeders, belt conveyors, belt feeders, screw feeders, pug mixers, Z-blade mixers, and a range of liquid and solid suspension mixing systems. The modular plant division ties it together, packaging equipment configurations that can be commissioned and operational in compressed timeframes — a capability that is particularly attractive in emerging and remote mining environments where infrastructure constraints make speed of deployment critical.
The comminution challenge is one the industry takes seriously. Grinding and milling are among the most energy-intensive processes in mineral beneficiation, and the pressure to improve energy efficiency while maintaining throughput is intensifying as mines go deeper and ore grades decline. MechProTech’s in-house design capability, built up over more than two decades, positions it to address these challenges with solutions tailored to specific site conditions rather than off-the-shelf configurations that may not account for local variables.
GLOBAL AMBITIONS
The company’s international expansion story is now moving from ambition to action. MechProTech has registered a company in Australia and is in the process of launching operations. A Canadian entity, MechProTech Canada, is also being established, with a global holding company planned to oversee international operations.
“We hope to continue to manufacture from South Africa initially because rates are favourable,” Bird notes. “A lot of the companies we deal with in this space are multinationals and they are represented worldwide.” The strategy — leveraging South Africa’s manufacturing cost advantage while accessing new markets through local entities — is one that keeps quality control close to home while opening doors that a purely domestic business cannot reach.
An active conference and exhibition marketing strategy underlines how seriously the company is building its international profile. MechProTech participates annually in the Future Minerals Forum in Saudi Arabia, the Mining Indaba in Cape Town and PDAC in Toronto. Africa Down Under in Adelaide, IMARC in Sydney, and ElectraMining in South Africa all feature on the calendar. MTE shows across Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia and Tanzania extend the African reach. “One of the big opportunities for us is the CIM Convention in Vancouver,” says Maputla. Beyond commercial engagement, the company sponsors career days at institutions including the University of Pretoria — investing in the pipeline of engineers who will one day work with the equipment MechProTech builds.
The supply chain that supports all of this is built on the same values-driven philosophy that runs through the business. MechProTech works with preferred partners for motors, switchgear, variable speed drives, automation systems and gearboxes, specifying according to client requirements rather than tying to a single supplier. Ethics and alignment matter more than price, explains Bird. “We look for those who are sustainable and eco-friendly, but the biggest thing for us is ethics and honesty,” he says. “We are all about solving problems and not about risky contracts and obligations. We like to work with those that have similar values as us — those that want to be creative in addressing challenges.”
In practice, that means long-term relationships with suppliers who understand the mining environment, respond to bespoke requirements, and share a commitment to quality that the company’s clients rely upon. “We provide good quality equipment at a good price, and it has sustainability through a service back up,” Bird reiterates. “That is not something offered from everyone, and we are proud of our equipment.”
From a consultancy in a workshop to a group of companies targeting half a billion rand in revenue and establishing operations across three continents, MechProTech’s trajectory says something important about what South African manufacturing can achieve when the engineering is strong, the vision is clear, and the values hold firm.