SVS Ingenieros, a Peruvian company providing consulting services to the mining, engineering, and civil construction industries, celebrated its 30th anniversary with a cocktail party attended by clients, founding staff, and employees past and present.
Established in 1985 by Antonio Samaniego, Ernesto Valle and Carlos Soldi, SVS initially specialized in geotechnical and underground engineering, mainly for the mining industry. Over the subsequent years, the company’s focus expanded to include mine tailings, waste management, and environmental services. SVS now employs over 100 professionals with extensive experience in surface and underground mining, geology, geotechnical and civil engineering, environmental control, and mining health and safety.
It is SVS’s vision to be the consultant of choice in its local market. It aims to play an active role in South America and the rest of the world by providing its customers with exceptional service and meeting the highest international standards of quality, safety, and social responsibility. The company moved closer to this goal in 2011 when it merged with SRK Consulting.
SRK is a global mining consultancy that was founded in 1974. At the time of the merger, SRK had already worked on many projects in Peru and had enjoyed a strong working relationship with SVS for almost 20 years. Since joining SRK, SVS has built a new, Lima-based Geology and Mining team to serve SRK’s clients from a local Peruvian base. The team provides services in exploration geology, mineral resource and ore reserve estimation, and mine design to clients in Peru and the surrounding countries.
“SVS and SRK have worked together to align both their services and work processes,” said SRK Principal Consultant James Gilbertson, who moved to Peru eighteen months ago to help set up the new team. “By combining local experience and expertise with a globally-recognized company employing more than 1,400 professionals worldwide, the SRK Group has been able to gain a stronger foothold in the region and provide local clients with new mine engineering, geology, and other specialized services.”
The two companies have successfully collaborated on a range of South American projects. At the Inmaculada underground gold and silver operation in southern Peru, they produced basic and detailed mine plans with SVS advising on geotechnical and ground engineering and SRK Australia on mine design. For Chucapaca/San Gabriel, one of the largest undeveloped gold projects in Peru, SRK created the conceptual design for the underground operation with SVS preparing the geotechnical and logistical designs and SRK Vancouver the block and sub-level caving design. Teams from both SVS and SRK Denver worked on the geotechnical designs for the Mina Justa open pit mine. And, in Columbia, SRK conducted a preliminary impact assessment for the Miraflores deposit with collaboration between a mining engineering team from SRK Denver and geotechnical and tailings design experts from SVS.
While SVS retained its name for five years after the merger, it announced at the cocktail party that from January 1, 2016, it will use its new business name, SRK Consulting (Peru) S.A.
“SVS and SRK are committed to carrying on sharing their professional knowledge and expertise and to adding value to their clients’ projects well into the future,” said Gilbertson.
