Metalogalva: Tower designers and manufacturers

TowerXchange asked Bruno Mota, Manager of Metalogalva’s Telecoms Business Unit, to explain the quality differentiators and economics of telecom tower design and manufacture, and to describe and how they adapt to meet the changing needs of customers as their structural requirements change from capacity for single to multiple tenants.

TowerXchange: Where does Metalogalva fit in the telecom tower ecosystem?

We design, manufacture and galvanise towers, for telecoms, transmission line poles, substations, lighting poles, road structures, catenaries and solar structures. For the telecom industry, we manufacture monopoles, lattice and tubular towers from existing designs - Metalogalva’s standard - or we develop a new design in order to meet customers’ specific requirements.

We have our own factories, which we adjust according to the requirements of the work, with capacity to galvanise up to 140,000 tonnes per year. We have specialist equipment including welding robots, plasma and laser cutting machines and CNC machines for cutting, drilling and punching profiles and L shaped section. We also have in-house an automatic powder coating line (with capacity of 1400m²/day) and we have as well a liquid painting unit, so we are able to do the DUPLEX system with good quality at fair prices. Right now we are doing some interesting projects with camouflaged towers (Pine|Palm towers) for a partner with lots of experience in this niche market.

To get an idea of our capacity in telecoms, we recently produced 114 towers in under one month for Vodacom Mozambique.

TowerXchnage: What is Metalogalva’s experience in Africa?

In the last year we have manufactured over 200 telecom towers which are now installed in Unitel’s network in Angola and in the network of Vodacom Mozambique. We’re looking to expand to send our towers to countries like Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania.

In these cases we didn’t sell directly to the operators, but were introduced by our partners locally. We’ve also sold towers into Algeria, Morocco, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Prí­ncipe markets indirectly. We’re interested in building relationships with other tower installation companies in Africa, in order to spread our product to other emergent markets.

Metalogalva also have several important clients in Europe, for example we supply towers to E-Plus and Vodafone in Germany, and two years ago we won a big project for TGV in France called GSMR Synerail to supply GSM towers.

TowerXchange: How should buyers distinguish between the quality of products offered by different tower manufacturers?

We source our steel mainly from ArcelorMittal, the world’s leading steel producer - we don’t use second rate steel. It’s important to confirm that your tower manufacturer uses raw material from a reputable company, and we use 3.1 certified raw material whether we’re shipping to Germany or Angola. All the procedures we use are certified like for example welding (DIN 18800) or galvanisation (DASt22). We are as well certified by ISO9001, ISO14001, OHSAS18001, CE mark and EN1090 (EXC3).

There are different standards and specifications in different markets. Our solutions meet the customers requirements and they are adapted to the location where they will be placed. We have a technical department with eight Structural Engineers able to design structures according to any norm required: Eurocode or TIA for example.

The lifetime of a tower has a lot to do with the thickness of the paint and the zinc galvanisation, so we can offer towers with a 10, 15 or even 25+ year guarantee depending on the client’s requirements and its own respective budget. We use the 1461 Euronorm standard for galvanisation.

Our competitiveness comes from optimised and custom solutions, introducing technology on the production process such us robots, lasers, powder coating, and also Kaizen concepts.

TowerXchange: What is the tradeoff between tailor made solutions to meet the specific requirements of each cell site versus installing standard, and therefore lower cost, towers?

If we have an order for 200 different towers then that requires lots of unique designs to be verified, lots of different drawings to be prepared - a lot of work is needed before manufacture. In addition the performance of our production line will be reduced, making our solution less competitive. So instead the optimum solution might be to create four variants on a standard tower, enabling us to produce four batches of fifty towers for example, so we can offer a more competitive manufacturing price, and facilitate easier mounting/logistics of the structures on the field.

There are fixed costs that are the same whether we’re producing one tower, 50 or 200. We’re very competitive at a larger quantity as we can use serial production techniques.

TowerXchange: Tell us about the implications for the design and reinforcement of towers as clients add additional tenants.

There are now a number of companies offering solutions to reinforce towers to achieve more capacity.

If one of our customers wants a tower with 6sqm on top, we may evaluate their requirements and find they can be met by a standard tower, or we may need to design a new structure. Then if the customer wants to add additional antennae, requiring additional capacity, then we have a multidisciplinary team of engineers who can quickly verify if it is possible to apply more load. If there is no additional capacity, the customer may need to reinforce or replace the tower.

We can also offer towers designed to be easily upgraded after installation. For example, we recently applied for a tender in France for two variants of 30m tower designs, evolutive and non-evolutive. The evolutive designs have 4sqm of capacity at the top, but it is possible to add an extra section to add a further 3sqm of capacity to enable sharing the tower with more operators, so we design the structure for 7sqm capacity.

TowerXchange: Finally, please sum up how you would differentiate Metalogalva from other tower manufacturers.

In 2013 we invested €6.6m in new equipment, enabling us to produce towers more efficiently.

Moreover, we have been serving the market for 42 years, which means we have a lot of ‘know how’ in what we do.

We think it’s very important to achieve our lead time commitments, whilst maintaining quality.

And we think it’s important to give constant support to our customers, to act quickly to meet their needs, which means Metalogalva has many happy customers!

Metalogalva will be exhibiting at the 5th Annual TowerXchange Meetup Africa & Middle East, being held on 3-4 October at the Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg. Visit the website for more information