Finland and Russia based ZYFRA Group, the AI and IIoT solutions developer for industry is acquiring VIST Group, one of the industrial leaders in development and implementation of technologies for digital mining for $30 million. Through acquisition of this asset the company is planning to occupy a significant share of global intelligent mining market.
“Via several acquisitions and organic business growth, we are absolutelly on track to reach our $30 million sales target for 2018 as part of our wider strategy to become a leading integrated digital industrial solutions vendor,” said Igor Bogachev, ZYFRA Oy CEO. With the acquisition of VIST Group, ZYFRA has broadened its international footprint and will now also be operating in Belarus, Mongolia and Morocco. It is also planning to expand into Vietnam, Indonesia and Chile in 2019 and in South Africa in 2020.
On top of international expansion, the company says it is firing on all cylinders to complete the “Intelligent mine” project – a complex solution for unmanned surface mining with application of self-driving vehicles. VIST Group is planning to spend “a material share of investment” provided by ZYFRA to accelerate its R&D projects including self-driving vehicles, automated surface mining machines (robots) and appliances, broader IoT and AI based solutions application as well as predictive analytics.
“There is a request from the market – industrial giants are looking for the options to improve the entire production chain efficiency, not its separate elements. I believe that technological synergy of the two companies will significantly boost commercial and innovation potential of our solutions in respond to this request,” noted Dmitry Vladimirov, VIST Group CEO.
“With integration of VIST Group solutions into our single digital platform for the industry will allow us to achieve a synergistic effect and bring additional value to our customers around the globe from the metal and mining industry. For example, we are now ready to realise a digital mining and processing plant project by the principle “Mine to Mill”, said Pavel Rastopshin, Managing Director of ZYFRA.
“Our view is that there’s a tremendous opportunity for disruption in Industrial IoT and applied AI space, although it is still a nascent market to a larger extent – said Ilia Kreisel, Investment and IR Director at ZYFRA Group. If you look at Gartner latest Magic Quadrant for IIoT platforms, you can quickly arrive at the conclusion that the market still lacks a clear leader, which leaves the doors wide open for the up and coming challengers like ourselves.”
The global market for digital mining solutions is expected to reach $23 billion by 2024. It is expected that over 35% of global mining companies will increase their investments in digital solutions and AI technology. After the acquisition deal with ZYFRA, VIST Group “is gaining new resources to compete with market players like Caterpillar, Hitachi, Komatsu and Hexagon Mining.”
ZYFRA is applying cutting edge data science combined with industrial expertise to provide end-to-end solutions for optimising production speed, quality, and costs for industries such as machinery, metallurgy, oil and gas and mining. The company, founded in November 2017, currently operates in Finland, China, Russia, Bulgaria and India.