Jonmoore International: Transport and Logistics Specialist in Ghana and West Africa

Interview with Hilton John Mitchell, CEO of Jonmoore International Ltd

What is your assessment of the transport and logistics sector in Ghana?

The transport and logistics market in Ghana has grown rapidly over the last ten years, especially with the oil find that has more companies coming into logistics that serve the oil and gas sector. There are also companies that serve the mining sector, power generation, manufacturing, and general industry. There is a general build up from that sector, especially for companies like ourselves and companies that are similar to us that are asset owned or put together assets from various parts. We have also had international logistics companies that have offices in Ghana that would generally be doing the same kind of thing that we are doing. Most of them, however, are not asset owned companies. They just set up an office, secure the business, and then look for third-party subcontractors to carry out the service. But we are an asset owned company and that is what we have built over the last 20 years. The industry is growing. It is getting smaller and more competitive, but over the years, we have looked at the region as the West African region. We have not limited ourselves to Ghana, but we see our bigger market as the West African subregion and that is what keeps us going.

How competitive is the market in the sector? Do you see any trends?

The market is very competitive all over the region. Ivory Coast is a busy country. Guinea is picking up very well because of all the mining of iron ore, bauxite, etc. So, looking at the region, you can see that it is growing. We are getting more companies coming into the region, especially the multi-nationals that have presence in these countries. We would tend to face competition everywhere we go, but we generally have to build ourselves up to be ready for that competition and present a winning proposition all the time.

What are your competitive advantages? Where do you stand out and differentiate yourself from others in such a competitive market?

Our core competencies are in trucking and transport, lifting which is cranage and forklifts, customs clearance, storage and warehousing. We can go up to any client and offer up a total logistics solution for whatever you want to do.

One of the things that gives us strength in competition is the human resource that we have. Over the years, we have built up a strong human resource, training, career development, and the team we have. The company is 20 years old and over 70% of our staff have worked here for over 15 years and some for 10 to 15 years. So, we have not had a high human resource turnover. We train people, we develop their capacity, we built them up from scratch to where they are today. We have looked at methods and procedures for keeping staff in the organization. Over the years, you build up a more experienced person who understands what it takes to keep the business going and keep the customer happy. That is one of our strengths. Another strength is that we have committed ourselves from day one to be an asset owned organization. That comes at a very high cost because your capital expenditure is high. You have to own assets rather than just rent or lease them for the short term and give them back or use subcontractors. We have invested in assets: equipment, trucks, specialized trailers, forklifts, convoy vehicles, cranes. Everything we have had to operate with we have decided to own it and have control over it. Then, we can actually use that as a basis to train the human resource to be able to manage that equipment that we own. We can walk into any project on short notice with the capabilities and capacities to execute the project. Last but not least is building up our safety culture. Safety is a big thing for us. We strive to make sure every exercise we do is incident free and that compliance is at the highest level. Although we are a small organization, we have a quality assurance and quality control unit with a fully-fledged health and safety team at every site. If we have a project in Takoradi in the western region, we have a health and safety person there. If we are doing a job out in Mali, we strive to be able to have a health and safety person on the ground with the client. We want to make sure we are following compliance and that the right policies and procedures are met.

What does being an ISO certified company bring to you?

We have always committed ourselves to work with certain standards, but four years ago, we told ourselves that we need to make sure those standards are measured by an independent organization to make sure they are really up to scratch. So, we applied for ISO certification. DNV, an international certification company, came in and we passed on our first audit for ISO 9001, which is for quality management systems. That proved that our management systems were up to scratch and up to the quality that we were supposed to be dealing with. Then, we moved on to ISO 14001 which is for health and safety in regard to how we work. Do we comply with the safety standards we are supposed to be working with? Do we comply with the personal assessments of what we do in terms of safety? We also achieved ISO 14001 certification. Then, we moved on to ISO 18001 which deals with environmental safety. Are we disposing of things we use the correct way? Are we segregating our waste? Are we making sure that we dispense whatever chemicals or lubricants or whatever we use? Are we following those standards? We also achieved that certification. We are happy to say that we are ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and ISO 18001 certified. Prior to that, we were working with certain standards but decided to also test our standards on anti-bribery and corruption. So, we positioned ourselves for certification by TRACE, which is an international organization that certifies or vets how you conduct business. We have been TRACE certified for the past four years in terms of how we do business. We have zero tolerance for bribery. We are a strong anti-bribery and anti-corruption organization and we hold ourselves high in that regard. We know that sometimes we walk into situations where you would find that it is obvious that you need to be able to either bribe or compromise to be able to get things done. We will walk away from that. We would rather not make it in that manner. We want to get it done in the right way or we will walk away from it completely.

What are your core competencies? Where do you work?

Our core competencies are in trucking and transport, lifting which is cranage and forklifts, customs clearance, storage and warehousing. We can go up to any client and offer up a total logistics solution for whatever you want to do, from setting up a power generation plant, setting up a mining plant, setting up a gold processing plant, to setting up an oil and gas facility. We would then identify from you where your supplies are coming from and where your equipment is coming from around the world. We have a global forwarding network of shipping lines and shipping agents. We would arrange for your equipment or supplies or consumables to be picked up, transported to the port wherever it is in the world, shipped into Ghana, customs cleared. If we have to store them, we store them or deliver them to your site. If we have to put in cranage to be able to install some of your equipment, we will have a crane on site. We will show you the lifting plan and have the discussion with you on how we plan to carry all this out, obviously in conjunction with the team that the client brings to the table. We would help set up the plant. When the plant or the facility is up and running, there would be consumables or things that need to be done on a day to day basis, so we would offer you forklift services. We are asking the client to concentrate on their core activities and let us deal with the logistics problems for them. We do a lot of work with Tullow Oil. Some of the places we operate with them today are their operations in the Jubilee fields of Ghana and in Takoradi in the western region where we manage all the forklifts on the shore base, both indoor forklifts for the warehousing and outdoor forklifts for the yard facility. We do cranage in some of the mine sites here in Ghana like Tarkwa, Nzema mine, Sota, as well as in Burkina Faso, Niger, and Guinea. We have cranes spread all around the West African region providing lifting services for clients. Also, we have a fleet of about 65 trucks of various configurations. Some of the trucks are used to move earth moving equipment. We can move excavators up to 250 tons, we can move bowmill sections for mining, transformers for power generation, containers, bagged lime which is quicklime and hydrated lime for the mining sector into Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and even in Ghana. Trucking and transport is a quite varied area. We even move small packages from the airport. We have small one-and two-ton trucks that can pick up an air freight from the airport and rush it up to a mine site in Guinea in two to three days.

What regions and countries are you present in?

In Guinea, we work in two mines in the north for our client, African Mining Services Logistics Direct, which is a mining construction company. We do deliveries from Ghana and Burkina Faso into Guinea. We move equipment across the region for our client. They might have some equipment in Guinea that they need to move to the Burkina side, or something in Burkina that they need to move to Niger or Ghana or Mali. Generally, it is a lot of mining equipment across the boundaries of Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and also Ghana. We also do quite a bit of trucking from Ghana into Ivory Coast for one of our clients and within Ivory Coast from the ports to mines in the midwestern region and sometimes the northern region. In Burkina Faso, we work moving equipment across four different mine sites for our clients. We do the same in Niger for some state organizations.

How do the events in Burkina Faso affect your business?

One of the key things we always keep our eyes on is safety and security. We would definitely be monitoring activities all over the region, no matter what kind of activity is taking place. We always have a security notice that we alert our team. If their area is somewhere it is not safe to go through, we let them know and have them wait until we get clearance. That has generally kept our team safe. Our clients also monitor and give us information on anything that relates to an unsafe area or unsafe conditions that prevail in West Africa. We cannot single out a country, but we generally look at all countries including Ghana for situations that are unsafe.

What is a success story that you are proud of?

We have been around for 20 years. We have clients that have been with us for close to 20 years. That is one of the things that makes us proud. We always say that it is not the check that comes in or the payment notice that you see on the computer. For us, the joy is getting an email from a client like African Mining Services or Tullow Oil or one of the clients that we have worked with for many years like Rock Oil or Camer saying that our delivery was safely completed. Or that they had looked at our deliveries from last year and realized that we did very well and they commend us for that. Or we get a commendation coming from a third-party on the mine side to our client to us. The payment is definitely a reward for the service, but you cannot match any reward without making sure you do a safe delivery and a commendation for that service. That is what keeps us going and what makes us proud.

What are the challenges that you face?

Our biggest challenge relates to the conditions of the roads and a lot of education is required in terms of how people run on our roads. Our roads are some of the biggest death traps you can find. We have speed limiters on our vehicles, they are satellite tracked, they have speed warnings, they are not allowed to drive at certain times, and we have curfews from 8pm to 5am because of the conditions of the roads. If a driver speeds and crosses the 75 km/hr mark, there is a beep in the vehicle and a notice on the computers in this office, people get text messages on their phones. When drivers cross geographical zones and boundaries they are not supposed to we receive a notice. We use these measures to be able to keep control and check for safety purposes. You can see that we are sometimes exposed to certain hazards which you cannot control on our roads. We cannot say that we have not gone through challenges and difficult times. We have. Situations occur that are sometimes outside of your control. But you have to constantly inculcate in the team that safety is of paramount importance. So, looking at that, you see that as a big challenge. Then, you come to other challenges of doing business where you sometimes get into multiple costs or multiple procedures that lead to high cost. We have to manage all that, especially in the environment we are in. Some of them could also be small procedures that might relate to extortion at some of the country borders or boundaries or offices. We might get a case where a driver calls and says a policeman is trying to extort money from him for no reason. We have to deal with that. We stand by certain principals so those things do not happen to us. We also try hard to do a lot of education, a lot of training. We spend a lot of money in human resource capacity training, both inside and outside the country.

Are you looking to develop any sort of technical or investment partnership?

We have some partnerships we have developed over the years, some affiliations, and some of the partnerships relate to technical assistance or asset acquisition. We have a partnership with a company out of Trinidad and Tobago, Paramount Transport and Trading. They are lifting partners that give us all the support in all our cranage acquisition, training of our crane staff, etc. We have a partnership with a company in the Netherlands called Peinemann. It is one of the largest lifting companies in Europe. They support us with equipment like forklifts that we use for all our lifting work, technology transfer, spare parts. We also have a partnership with another company out of the Netherlands called Zwagerman which is involved in lifting, trucking and transport, and they give us a lot of technical support in asset acquisition, in buying the right trucks and trailers, making sure that we have the right fleet, and training. We also have an affiliation with TII out of Germany. It is a Scheuerle/Nicolas trailer company and they give us training in acquiring our equipment. These are technical partners we have had and the good thing is that most of these companies that we work with also support us on financial options that we look for. If we have to acquire an asset or equipment, one of the partners would offer to arrange finance for us from Europe which would be cheaper than the finance we would get otherwise. It all comes full circle. Generally, our suppliers give us suppliers’ credit at very competitive rates and we are grateful to them for that.

Project yourself into the medium term, two to three years’ time. How do you see the company developing?

Our vision over the years has always been to be the preferred logistics service provider in the region. In the years ahead, we cannot just be complacent and sit and hope that we will always be the preferred logistics service provider. There are certain things we need to do. We need to develop our technical capabilities. We need to develop our software. We need to increase our learning procedure. We need to increase the quality of the equipment we use and move into more sophisticated and updated equipment. We are looking at ourselves in the years ahead as a company that will be growing with the technology. So, the processes and procedures we were doing three years ago would no longer be there. Three years from now, we should be using processes that are three and four years ahead of their time. We will be looking at having independent entities in the regions that we operate in. We will still have affiliations in the regions where we operate, we will still move assets between the regions, but we want to build ourselves up to be able to say that our assets in Guinea are Guinean assets or equipment we have in Guinea would stay in Guinea and work for Guinea, or Mali in Mali, and Burkina Faso the same. We want to have independent operations and obviously that comes with some amount of capital expenditure. We would still be looking for partnerships that would help us grow in that direction, a mutual partnership and win-win situation. We want partnerships that would help us grow and stand independent in the region. We always want to see ourselves as a company and an organization that was born in Africa, grew up in Africa, and lives for Africa.

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