For the December quarter Bucyrus notched up $81 million in net earnings, up 24% year-on-year but including a 21% slump in original equipment sales, mainly due to a fall in demand for electric mining shovels.

Underground mining original equipment sales for the quarter fell 7.7% to $208 million, the result of fewer sales in the room and pillar and belt system product lines.

But total original equipment sales for 2009 reached $821 million, 11% up on 2008, with Bucyrus saying this was primarily due to increased longwall sales in the US and Czech Republic, along with higher sales of room and pillar equipment into China.

Aftermarket parts and service sales also performed well for both underground and surface sectors, with Bucyrus notching up a total 13.2% year-on-year gain to $1.3 billion for 2009.

During the conference call on the results, Bucyrus chief executive Tim Sullivan said the company had benefited from the additional aftermarket sales and reduced raw material costs.

But he added that raw material costs, especially coking coal and iron ore prices, were starting to move up again.

He expects more export activity from the eastern US as demand for coking coal increases, but said it was still going to be a fairly challenging year for most US coal producers.

Commenting on the company’s recent Indian longwall contract win, Sullivan said he thought the company had worked on it “for about 20 years”

“Now that they’ve got one we think there’s going to be additional activity of longwall in India,” he said.

“They do have underground coal reserves. About 20 per cent of their coal reserves are underground, but yes, we see that they want to exploit their underground. They want to use Western equipment so we think that that’s a good opportunity going forward.”

Sullivan is bullish on 2010 and expects Australia, Brazil and India to be strong markets.

Bucyrus ended 2009 with a $101 million cash position and a total equipment backlog of $1.88 billion.