Hitachi invests $875 million into innovation for Australian

The future mining sector in Australia will be machine driven, so says one of the leading suppliers of machinery and technology.

Hitachi, the global provider of excavators and haulage trucks, has invested more than $875mn into Australia over the last 18 months as the company continues to enable tech innovation and machine automation.

The majority of that spending went directly into the Australian mining sector.

The move comes as part of a larger companywide investment of $1.25bn into Social Innovation, in which Hitachi believes there will be 28 billion connected devices by 2020.

Hitachi is a firm believer that by 2030 the Australian mining industry will be almost entirely autonomous, citing the rise of integrated operations centres, the increasing demand for autonomous vehicles, including Hitachi’s own autonomous haulage system, and drone image analysis, as well as other analytics-focused technologies.

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“Game-changing innovations, such as remote and integrated operations centres, autonomous vehicles and analytics, will have been filtered down from being used only by Australia’s largest mining companies, to being commonplace across the entire industry in less than 15 years,” Hitachi managing director Atsushi Konishi said.