Weir Minerals has strengthened its presence in Scandinavia with the addition of a dedicated service centre at a site in Gällivare, north Sweden. The new facility, which will provide enhanced support to customers across the region, is based alongside an existing manufacturing site operated by Gema Industri, the Swedish mine servicing business acquired by Weir Minerals in 2012. The service centre includes a team of technicians and support staff for contracts with customers including LKAB and Boliden. It offers a range of services for products including conveyor belts and pumps, and also has a machine workshop on site.

The facility will allow customers to access dedicated Weir Minerals products and services on-site. The opening follows a period of ongoing investment by the company in its service offering, including new sites in Keminmaa in Finland, Essen in Germany and Nederweert in the Netherlands, all of which opened in the past two years. The company said that the continued strengthening of its network of service centres “ensures faster turnaround of repairs and enables customer-specific, regular service programmes, maximising mean-time between failures and ensuring minimum downtime when replacements are needed.”

Tony Locke, Managing Director of Weir Minerals Europe, said: “Sweden, along with the rest of Scandinavia, is a key growth region for us and this extended service offering will provide improved specialist, on-the-ground support for our expanding customer base in the area. Increasingly, customers want through-lifecycle support for the products we provide, offering them peace of mind and on-call expertise. Our end goal in strengthening our network of service centres remains improving reliability and reducing downtime at the operations of our customers.”