A shift in thinking in emerging markets such as China, India and Russia has opened the door for Joy Global’s underground coal equipment.

“Traditionally the US, South Africa, Australia and the UK have constituted the development of high productivity coal production in the world. But that has changed very dramatically as we’ve seen a change in emerging markets in the developing world,” said Hanson.

“Change comes in a couple of flavours. One is that while most of these markets historically looked at commodity production as a source of hard currency and a source of employment. The dramatic change that has taken place is the realisation that the availability of reliable, cheaper electricity is in fact a pre-cursor to economic development.”

This change in thinking, Hanson said, had driven many emerging markets to recognise energy and coal production at a high level of productivity was in fact the key to long-term economic development.

“So we see many of these emerging markets today really driving to take high productivity mining and that is what provides us with the opportunity in our basic business,” he said.

Joy has managed to secure some major equipment shipments to China in 2002-2003, have sent a second set of continuous miners to India and have seen an increase in Russian activity.

“Our strategy has been to get in place a high field population of very high productivity in mines and follow that with the infrastructure that then allows us to create a real life cycle strategy in these markets,” he said.

Joy recently actioned this strategy in China with a new service centre in Baotou, which will be officially opened this month.

“Our thinking is long term, it means we don’t always exploit the near-term possibilities to the extent they might be but we think we so secure over the long term market position and the capabilities to be the long term suppliers in each of these markets,” he said.