First, some history: Robbins and Lok Home go back a long way. “I started working for the company in 1968, if that’s credible” he says. “I was something very junior out of mining school.” He stayed with James S Robbins Co, as it was then, until around 1980 when he moved to competitor Atlas Copco Jarva. “Then I started my own company, Boretec, rebuilding TBMs; and in 1998 Boretec bought Robbins.” Since then, Home has been owner and president of the company and its reputation in TBMs for hard rock and difficult conditions has forged ahead. The company proudly claims nearly 90% of all world records for high-speed tunnelling.
Recently though things have not gone well. In 2016, Chinese heavy industry company NHI bought a majority share of the company – the transaction gained a ‘Deal of the Year’ award from more than one financial organisation. Which shows that financial wizards are not as omniscient as perhaps they might be, because in 2018 NHI became insolvent. In October 2019, Robbins went into receivership, a move initiated by Home as president, a large creditor, and a minority shareholder; the move was said to be part of an effort to ‘improve Robbins’ liquidity, address governance issues, and effectuate a restructuring of the company’s financial affairs’.
Now, just over a year later, Home has bought his company back. He did so with his own money through a company newly-formed for the purpose, Global TBM. The sum is undisclosed: “I will keep that confidential,” he says.
So what went wrong, and how has it been rectified? The problem, as the summary above might indicate, stemmed from the Chinese link-up. Home tells the story: “Robbins was mainly in rock-boring machinery” he says. “We did tunnels through hard rock; that was our forte, that’s what we were going for. Rock tunnels tend to be for hydroelectric and deep sewers and the like. Several years ago, I decided to start looking at soil-boring machines for softer grounds, specifically for metro systems. That was where the big market was. Almost all the big cities are on softer rock, or sands and clays. Some cities – Washington DC and Hong Kong, for example – have their metros bored through rock but most of the expansion is in cities like London and Tokyo, which are silt and clay.
“Therefore around that time I went to the Chinese company NHI, which owned the French TBM company NFM. We had worked in joint ventures on different things together over the years. So I decided to sell 61% of my stock in Robbins to the Chinese company that owned NFM.”
It seemed a good idea at the time: “Other reasons were to raise capital and pay some debt. It was also a strategy for world presence: NHI was supposed to have cost-effective manufacturing capability in China, and we would have total world marketing and some control in the industry.
“That was the premise,” he says, “but it didn’t go well.” In fact, it went wrong quickly: “Just months after signing the agreement, the management changed at NHI, and a year after that, NHI actually went into bankruptcy in China.”
Home then bought back the company and says: “For the past year, I have been extricating the Robbins company from NHI’s ownership. I completed it a few months ago. So that’s the history. I guess you could call it a rebirth.”
“It would have been complicated for anyone else to buy because there were so many interrelated contracts and unknown risks, so in a way I was the natural buyer” he says. “I didn’t go out and raise any money for it; I just used my own resources.” The company is now wholly his own; it will trade simply as ‘Robbins’, rather than ‘The Robbins Company’ but apart from that, it is business as usual.
“The net effect is that Robbins continues essentially seamlessly. There are a few projects we leave behind but not with any great problems, I think. We keep our key employees. We have had to reduce a bit with the Covid pandemic over the past year but generally we have kept our core team. Our strength in engineering is intact, as are our three operating facilities in Ohio, Washington State and W Virginia. Our big operating subsidiaries in China, India, Chile and Brazil, are pretty much operating as we did before, with upwards of 400 employees.”
Robbins is now a private company with Home as owner. “The technical outlook, the engineering philosophy, the vision if you like, is unchanged from before. We are not a manufacturer per se; we don’t have big factories, we have small assembly facilities. Our forte is our engineering, our ability to procure and specify very highly engineered components, and we subcontract the supply of all these components and then assemble them – and we do that at rented workshops.
“We still believe in our concept of OFTA (On-site First Time Assembly). It’s our goal to be good enough in our ordering and sub-assemblies that we don’t have to take the whole of a big machine, and all the expense of a big factory, and assemble it there, turn it over for an hour to see that it works, and then shut it down and disassemble all the units and ship them off to their final use spot, only to assemble them again. It is wasteful, it is inefficient, and if you get your specifications right with your suppliers it is not necessary.
“We have today excellent methods of quality control and component sizing and so on. For several years now, we have opted for engineers at site who can be trusted if things go wrong. The system depends on education of the site personnel, there are complications and it is not as easy as perhaps I have made it sound, but for us, it works.
“What I want to focus on in future is what we have always been focussed on, which is making our machines most suitable for the most challenging conditions. Those can include anything that can go wrong underground. It can be a mixture of rock, solid granite and sand, or other challenging conditions such as you find under high mountains with rock bursting in high stress.
“So, in the last ten years, I think we have done a very good job in making crossover machines. They can go through sand and soil and under water tables, and then enter solid rock and keep going. Even in the past five years, we have made great steps with that. We focus on what we call ‘difficult ground conditions’ – we almost coined that phrase. That is one of our focuses, that is our reputation, that is our history, and it is more or less our market niche. We are not set up to be the low-cost, straightforward, ‘easy tunnel through nice soft ground’ solution. Other people can do that. Our concept, if you like, is ‘if it’s difficult, go to Robbins’.”
One thing that is difficult, and that Robbins is tackling, is excavating tunnels that are not round.
“The big market in rock tunnelling is mines” says Home. “It has been estimated that for every kilometre of rock tunnel in civil construction – meaning hydropower, subways, sewers and water tunnels – there are seven kilometres in mines.” And in a mine, a round tunnel is often the wrong shape.
“Every time that you drill and blast, you need about six vehicles at the face. You need a vehicle to drill the holes, another to load the explosives, another to scale the rock, and one to haul-off the rock after you blast, then another to come with a surveyor, and then the boss comes down in his pickup to take a look; so there’s a traffic jam underground. And all these are now rubber-tyred vehicles so they don’t want round tunnels, they want ones with a floor to drive on. Round is the easiest shape to build but it’s not the easiest shape to use.
“But digging round has an advantage because the cutters on the rotating head are cutting full-time and in the same groove, so are under full load all the time: the efficiency is very high. If you dig out a partial face – say a rectangle – your cutters are continually bouncing out of the grooves and it is hard to get the benefit of full force in the same groove. Try drilling a square hole in wood with a round drill bit: it’s not easy.”
Robbins, however, has hacked it. “We have a TBM that is operating in a mine in Mexico; it is actually one of the oldest, continually-operating mines in North America. Our machine has been operating for a year and is 1,500 metres in. It is taking a little time to debug it, but that’s normal when you do something that is significantly different.”
But it is not a prototype: “I am against calling it that; in my vocabulary ‘prototype’ means it is not going to work very well. I am just calling it a ‘first unit.’ Then you get commitment from your team to make it work, and you get commitment from the mine to make it work; and we have both.”
However, Home is not revealing details of how it works. “We’ll have something to go to press within a few months. The fact that we are 1,500 metres in in a year is significant news in itself.
“Circular tunnelling will stay for a lot of reasons: it’s very efficient and also it has been very well developed over 50 years. But it is reaching the limits of development. Certainly flat bottoms in mines will be needed, and we will be able to do them. They will be standard in the industry in a few years. We are not the only ones working on them, but I would say we are far ahead. So we shall bring our focus back to mining, where it was before. Our business was half-mining, half-civil projects; I am hoping the mining proportion will grow.”
As for the future, Home sees costs per kilometre falling. “Part of tunnelling is the structure of how it is financed and who takes the risk – and that is a big barrier in civil tunnelling. It is more straightforward in mines: you decide how fast you want to go and just buy equipment; but civil is more challenging.
“I have a long-term view that the world has to accept more tunnelling otherwise our environment will never come into balance again. We cannot keep flying planes worldwide from destination to destination. Hyperloop was not conceived by Elon Musk; I remember a big Swiss study from 40 years ago that suggested they were the future of travel between cities, and even the Victorians attempted them. So the idea is not new but it is now realistic and is within the grasp of technology.
“I think if we really want to cut down on the environmental pollution which comes from transport, we must make such systems. They don’t have to be underground but they do have to be vacuum. And sometimes I think that that should be sought-after as much as we have sought after outer space. That sort of money should be spent in the ground so that we do not have so many jets taking off and spilling out fuel.
“I personally have been one of the world’s biggest polluters as an individual, based on the miles I have flown to carry out our business. I very strongly believe that hyperloop will come into vogue within, say the next twenty years. I certainly hope so. Let’s just say it is my ambition, and perhaps my conscience salve, to have the industry achieve such a goal.
“We have to emit less CO2 in constructing our tunnels. There are companies looking at different lining methods because concrete linings come with a lot of emissions. Of course, most metro systems are electric so that’s a good thing from the get-go. The great cities of the world are totally ‘metrofied’ – if I can invent the word. In fact one reason they are great cities is because they have great metros.
“And there are other big challenges in tunnelling. The Chinese are planning a series of train tunnels through Tibet – some of those are out to tender right now. And that is a huge, huge project, by far the world’s most challenging project in tunnelling. I have to give credit to the Chinese tunnelling industry. Within 20 years it has come from nowhere to fairly big time. They have three or four TBM manufacturers. They do a lot of good machines now. And Chinese engineers and workers are good tunnellers, right up there at the top.
“Here is a statistic I was told: there are 3,000 TBMs in operation in China. In the US, the number is probably between 30 and 40. But that imbalance may not be permanent. It is built on current needs, which may change. Forty years ago in Japan there was a similar situation. They were building metros for all their cities. They were building hundreds of tunnels, and companies like Kawasaki and Komatsu made TBMs to build them. When they had finished putting in the metros, the number of TBMs plummeted.
“This is going to happen in China. In five or ten years, 80% of the requirement for tunnels for metros is going to be finished, and it’s going to be hard for those companies to re-adjust to a difficult market. They are starting to understand how challenging it is out there in the international market.”
Speaking of challenges, how big a risk was it to take back Robbins, after all, Home had a large proportion of his personal wealth at stake. “There were times when I had to be concerned about the risks,” he says, “but if I hadn’t figured out risk in our business by now, I probably should have quit years ago. I understand the risk, and I sleep well at night.”
“And as usual, I look forward to the challenge ahead, about coming up with new concepts, keeping a few steps ahead of the people who want to expand too fast or too quickly. Also as usual, Robbins has an even bigger commitment to make better machines for more difficult conditions. That’s what we see as our mission, our obligation to the industry, and that’s what we are going to keep doing.”
