Swedish mining equipment leader Sandvik has reaffirmed its aim to generate software and digital sales exceeding US$600 million by 2025, having outlaid about $750 million for top-shelf mining-tech acquisitions in recent years.
The company said in its 2022 group annual report, presented this week, latest rolling 12-month sales from its “software and digital offering” totalled close to SEK4 billion (cUS$375m). It wants to reach SEK6.5b in 2025.
“With the acquisitions we made in 2021 in software connected to component manufacturing, we now have important building blocks in place to gradually realise our goal of helping our customers automate the entire production cycle – from design and planning to manufacturing and verification,” CEO Stefan Widing said in the report.
“The expansion of our digital offering in 2022 contributed to our overall growth targets significantly.
“The acquisition of mine planning software provider Deswik in 2022 contributed SEK620 million [US$58m] in revenue to Sandvik Mining and Rock Solutions and we had strong sales of autonomous mining equipment.
“We also increased the number of mines using our remote monitoring services.
“We saw strong sales of our AutoMine autonomous and remotely operated mobile equipment.”
Remote locations, decreasing ore grades and a requirement for high safety standards as mine owners pushed to increase production volumes were driving demand for semi-automated to fully automated equipment from Sandvik’s consolidated mining customer base of some 200 global major and junior miners.
“In addition to a strong position in battery-electric vehicles and fleet automation systems, we are a leading provider of mine planning software,” Widing said.
“This enables a full range of digital offerings throughout the value chain, with mine planning directly linked to safer operations planning, monitoring and execution.
“These new capabilities will help us build and develop even better products and solutions and help our customers design mines that are optimised for automation and electrification.
“We aim for digital leadership in our industries.
“We combine hardware and software to create optimised solutions for the manufacturing, mining and infrastructure industries.
“Our equipment and tools are increasingly becoming intelligent and automated, gathering data and enabling predictive maintenance, leading to improved productivity and sustainability for our customers.”
Widing said artificial intelligence and machine learning would be used for increasingly complex tasks and the implementation of 5G would contribute to more intelligent equipment.
Sandvik also wants to have 60% of customers of its Sandvik Rock Processing Solutions arm using its automated and digital offerings by 2025.
