Mike Ranallo named new head of Mining Suppliers Association

There isn’t much Mike Ranallo hasn’t seen in mining equipment over his 25 years in the supply industry. Besides earning the chairmanship of MSABC, he is vice-president of international sales and marketing for SMS Equipment—the amalgamation of Coneco Equipment, Transwest Mining and Equipment Federale under the Sumimotor umbrella. 

“I tried to retire from Komatsu two and a half years ago, but Bruce Knight, COO for SMS Equipment, wouldn’t allow it,” said Ranallo with a laugh.

Instead he was called in to help bring the three companies together and oversee Canadian sales, along with a $280 million project in Mongolia called Oyu Tolgoi, a Rio Tinto development. Two years ago SMS Equipment had three people stationed there; now the mine employs 250 SMS workers.

Ranallo was born in Chicago but has worked in Canada for the past 15 years. He is also an active member of the Canadian Institute of Mining and the SAE in the U.S.

“Canada is a great country with great people,” he said. “And the work here is very rewarding.”

His background is in architecture—a field that is hard to make a go at without a big name, he said. He started with International Harvester as a farm and construction equipment designer and moved on to plant engineer. He designed mining equipment for Phillipi Hagenbuch and was manager of engineering for Martin Engineering. When Komatsu offered him a job in marketing, he took it, interested in a change.

“I worked with Komatsu for 20-plus years. I started in the marketing department and worked my way up to director of mining sales for all of North America,” he said. “I always thought mining was interesting.”

A changing field

Ranallo said the biggest change he’s witnessed over the years has been the size of equipment used in mining.

“When I started with Phillipi we were looking at 150-ton trucks; those have grown to 360- and 400-ton trucks over the last 20 years,” he said. “The shovels, too, have grown from dropping 80 tons into a truck to dropping 120 tons. It’s very impressive.”

Komatsu is now starting to “knock on the door” of driverless trucks.

“I was on the ground floor of that and now the company is just putting together 150 of them to be running in Australia through Rio Tinto,” he said. “With more mines located in remote locations, those will be coming on big and coming fast.”

Ranallo said truck operators replaced by the autonomous trucks will find new jobs in maintenance and technology.

“It will be a higher level of education,” he said.

Challenges ahead

Ranallo believes miners and suppliers share the same number one challenge in North American mining: “Convincing the public that mining is a good thing. B.C. has the strictest environmental laws in the world, and you just don’t know how mining in third world countries is done. They might be using slave labour, child labour or unsafe mining practices, scarring and polluting the environment,” he said. “We have a wealth of minerals and a protective government—why not do it in B.C. and make the citizens of B.C. economically sound in the rural areas?"

He points out the way the Copper Mountain development turned Princeton, B.C., around economically—a success story Ranallo was a part of.   

“We were happy to be a main supplier of mobile equipment and committed many days and hours in Princeton,” he said. “To see the change there was tremendous and a blessing to the local community.”

As head of MSABC, Ranallo intends to keep increasing awareness about mining in communities around B.C., along with increasing the membership of the organization.

“We could tap another 900 in the supply industry in B.C.,” he said. “Anyone supplying services to a mine or to a mining company is eligible.”

He also intends to work closely with the Mining Association of BC and the Mining Association of Canada to create a more streamlined process for approving mining projects and to make people aware of the number of jobs the industry is responsible for in Canada.