Transcript: Good afternoon, this is Louis Cheyne, I’m the MD of Gabion Baskets.

It’s a Saturday afternoon, the 25th of March. I’m standing here at the Homemakers Fair in Midrand, Johannesburg, and we are currently promoting our products and services to the DIY and home markets.

I’d like to explain some of the things we offer for the DIY and home markets. We provide retaining wall materials made of gabions and river soil erosion protection offerings, as many people face these types of problems.

Most of our business focuses on riverbank stabilisation to prevent soil erosion along riverbanks, corners, and people’s property boundaries. We’re assisting significantly in this area.

New trends in our industry are emerging, particularly in the architectural market, where we’re providing the use of more square welded mesh top materials that look much better than the old hexagonal woven mesh materials.

We offer these in a wide variety of wire diameters and mesh openings. Up to now, we’ve been offering 50 x 50mm, 50 x 100mm, and 75 x 75mm mesh openings.

All these meshes are supplied with a 3-millimetre class A galvanised wire diameter to prevent corrosion.

We manufacture these in our factory, here in Johannesburg, in Bramley.

Shortly, we’ll be able to provide polyethylene-coated gabion welded mesh, giving them a longer design life in situations where there’s a high possibility of mesh corrosion, such as when we’re near rivers or streams that can cause water damage, leading to rusting of the gabions.

For many years now, we’ve been providing hexagonal woven mesh gabions with an 80 x 100mm aperture and a 2.7mm mesh wire diameter to the civil engineering industry predominantly, and quite a bit also to the mining industry.

New developments in this sector include moving from heavy-duty zinc galvanised materials to new polymer materials with a 5 per cent aluminium coating.

We’ll likely have that available in the next six months, then transition to a 10 per cent aluminium coating, alloy coating with a 90 per cent zinc coating to improve the design life of the zinc-coated product from perhaps 20-30 years to at least double that.

We are also working on PVC-coated materials with a design life of 60 years, aiming to push that to 120 years.

The polyvinyl chloride or PVC-coated mesh that we’ve used in rivers for the civil engineering sector in the past is being upgraded to a new polymer coating called HDPE, or High-Density Polyethylene Coating. This offers a longer lifespan on sites, better resistance to sunlight damage, improved resistance to damage in our factory, and is a cheaper product to provide. This will give us better life expectancy on site and the ability to offer it at a slightly lower price.

Not only do we manufacture these materials, but we also provide them to the industry.

We carry out full civil engineering designs of structures and provide the materials.

If clients wish to do the work themselves, we can send a trainer to the site to demonstrate how it’s done, using their own labour.

Alternatively, we offer full advisory and installation assistance with our own teams, both in Johannesburg and Durban. In Cape Town, we have an agent, Carl Gous, who handles all our installations for us.

These are exciting times, with lots of change in the market, as is the case everywhere else, and we’re ready for it and excited to talk about it.

Thank you very much.