Resemin Brand Guidelines: The Lima Drill-Rig Maker Behind the Muki Mini Jumbo

A Lima supplier that began to build its own machines.

Resemin is a Peruvian maker of drilling machines for underground mines, based in Ate, on the eastern side of Lima. It was founded in 1989 by the mining engineer James Valenzuela, who still leads it as chief executive. Infomercado, profiling him in August 2024, reported that he graduated from Lima’s Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería in 1982 and joined the Swedish group Atlas Copco in 1983, where he learned about tunnels, machinery and the products a mine runs on. He left to start his own company in 1989, during the severe industrial shortages of Alan García’s first government, a moment he described to the magazine as one of opportunity.

The business did not start out making machines. According to the same profile, Resemin first supplied spare parts and components for drilling equipment, and sold well for years until competition grew in the early 1990s. In 1994, Valenzuela told Infomercado, he decided the company had to move from selling parts to building machines. The early attempts were costly, and the turn came in 2001, when the company returned with new machinery and began to remake itself as a designer and manufacturer of underground drilling rigs.

Its first machine, Infomercado reported, was a hand-built electro-hydraulic production drill bought in Peru by the mining and trading group Glencore. That link carried Resemin to Zambia, where its first machines were sold in 2002; Valenzuela travelled there with a small team at the start of 2003 to operate the equipment, and he later set up a company in the country. From 2003, the profile says, Resemin concentrated on self-propelled machines with diesel engines, competing against the Swedish and Finnish equipment that dominated the trade.

Resemin’s own timeline names the Raptor long-hole jumbo as the first machine it built, and lists the first export, a Raptor to Zambia, followed by a first sale in Chile that opened Latin America. The company says its most important markets in the region are now Mexico, Bolivia and Argentina.

Raptor, Bolter, Troidon and Muki.

Resemin builds the jumbos that do the three main drilling jobs of an underground mine, and its timeline introduces each range in turn. The Raptor handles long-hole production drilling; the Bolter does mechanised ground support, drilling and setting the rock bolts that hold galleries and tunnels; and the Troidon was its first face-drilling jumbo for tunnel development. With the Troidon, the company says, it had a full set of jumbos for development, bolting and production, covering the whole underground mining cycle. It later added the Scalemin rock scaler, which clears loose rock from roofs and walls, along with utility machines.

The range that made its name is the Muki. ProActivo, the Peruvian mining magazine, reported in December 2019 that the first Muki was launched in 2015, called it the smallest drill in the world and said the company regarded it as its most important success; Infomercado dates the launch to May 2015 and says the machines were designed for narrow veins about a metre wide. Valenzuela told the magazine that miners had asked him years earlier for a mini jumbo, and that the name is a very Peruvian one: the Muki is the duende, or goblin, said to live in the mines of the Andes. Infomercado counted around 230 Mukis at work in 2024, in countries from Pakistan to Australia.

In a 2022 interview with Global Business Reports for its Peru mining edition, Valenzuela said the Muki family, which now spans development, long-hole and bolting versions, had changed how mining engineers plan narrow-vein mines by allowing smaller tunnel sections. In the same interview he described the T99 series of roof bolters, long-hole machines from the Muki LHBP up to the Raptor 55 2R, explosives chargers 1.30 to 1.50 metres wide, a T-Pointer system for converting development jumbos into scalers, for which a patent was pending, and a Jumbo Dual that he called the company’s most disruptive machine. He said Resemin sent its first battery-powered machine into a mine in February 2022; ProActivo had reported the announcement of its first battery-electric jumbo in 2019.

The company calls itself the third-largest maker of underground drilling equipment in the world and the leader in narrow-vein mining. ProActivo used similar terms in 2019, describing Resemin as the third most important brand in underground mining and the only Peruvian company that designs, makes and exports such machinery.

How mining equipment makers present themselves.

Mining equipment makers sell machines that most people never see at work. Their customers are mine operators, tunnelling contractors and quarry owners, and the machines spend their working lives underground or at the far end of an open pit. So the trade’s imagery tends to bring the site to the viewer: a drill rig in a floodlit tunnel, its booms reaching towards a rock face; a loader or haul truck in yellow or orange, picked out against grey stone; the beam of a headlamp in the dark.

Above ground, the favoured view is from high up. Photographs of open-pit mines show stepped benches cut into the earth, with trucks and drill rigs reduced to small bright shapes on the terraces. Underground pictures work the other way, close and cramped, with the machine filling the frame and the rock wall just beyond it.

Much of the rest of the visual language comes from proving that the machines work. Makers show equipment in test mines and at customer sites, and show it to the trade at fairs such as MINExpo International, which is organised by the US National Mining Association and describes itself as the industry’s largest global mining event; its next edition is scheduled for September 2028. Stands at such fairs put full-size rigs and loaders on display, often alongside screens showing the same machines below ground.

Behind the pictures sit very different companies. Some are divisions or spin-offs of large listed engineering groups; others are family firms or privately owned specialists built around one process, such as spraying concrete or charging explosives. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its machines are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Peruvian engineering, sold on five continents.

Resemin is Peruvian-owned and makes its machines in Peru. ProActivo described it in 2019 as a company with national capital and a portfolio of 31 models built with Peruvian engineering, and reported plans for a new plant of more than 15,000 square metres in Chosica, east of Lima. The company’s own timeline records the opening of a 15,000-square-metre assembly plant at Prialé, and says its thousandth machine sold was a Bolter 99, about twenty years after it began operating as a machine maker.

The company says it now has more than 1,000 employees, has sold more than 1,400 machines and is present in more than 24 countries through its own offices, strategic allies and distributors; the countries it names include Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, Zambia and India. ProActivo quoted Valenzuela in 2019 saying Resemin worked on large mining projects in more than 20 countries. The company also says Valenzuela won Peru’s LEC (Líderes del Cambio) award in 2017 and competed in Monaco that year for the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year title.

Its public voice is plain and practical. The company’s website promises drilling jumbos “of simple design, easy to operate and uncomplicated,” and its 2022 interview with Global Business Reports carried the same message, with Valenzuela saying Resemin offers only the automation it knows will work underground. The Muki’s name, taken from Andean mining folklore, now travels with the machine to mines far from Peru.

For a design guide, Resemin shows how a regional parts supplier can build an international machine brand around one memorable product name. Compare Atlas Copco, where its founder learned the trade, and Epiroc, another maker of underground drilling rigs. For this guide we use a copper orange, a deep graphite and a stone grey with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Resemin’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.