China’s Eacon Mining Technology has opened an office in Perth, Western Australia, as it looks to grow a large population of automated mine vehicles in China in other markets.
The company, which raised nearly US$100 million of equity funding in the past year from Chinese mining and investment groups, is aiming to import battery electric and hybrid battery mining trucks with its autonomy systems into Australia in the next 12-to-18 months.
Its small team has been working out of a Perth office of local mining contractor MACA, part of Thiess. Thiess, the world’s largest surface mining contractor, is understood to be close to signing a memorandum of understanding with Eacon on future truck supply.
Eacon chief operating officer Elaine Jin said the company was busily hiring and looking to fill a spacious West Perth office.
“We are keen to grow fast,” she said at the opening.
“Last year when I first met you guys I said we had 39 autonomous trucks running. Today we have 500 trucks running at 13 mine sites.
“We are one of the top-rated suppliers of autonomy technology worldwide.
“We aim to have 1000 trucks by the end of this year, and hopefully at that time we will rank the No.1 largest provider in the world.
“Achieving this in just a short six years hasn’t been an easy journey.
“[But] we decided to raise our stakes and drive into the Australian market this last year.
“It’s a tough journey but we have confidence because of our product. We use an advanced distributed architecture for the autonomy which separates us from our competitors. Every truck has a really powerful brain; they can make their own decisions.
“We [have] less network and other infrastructure dependence and also rely less on the central controllers. The truck is really smart and can adapt to different scenarios.
“We want to bring those differences and innovations into Australian mining.”
