Sandvik plots new course to mining heavyweight rank
- 23 May 2025
Sandvik aims to elevate itself to the top shelf of the global mining equipment business with annual sales above US$10 billion by 2030. Company leaders said this week market adoption of new generation machines and digital and automation technology were keys to its rise.
Add the mining and minerals component of Sandvik’s Rock Processing arm – with a projected $1.14 billion of sales in 2030 – and the Swedish group’s total sector exposure could expand to circa-$11.5 billion, in today’s dollars, which is not far off the current mining-related sales of industry gorillas, Komatsu and Caterpillar.
Of course, these two majors aren’t standing still and just as Sandvik aims to make deeper inroads into the surface drilling market, Komatsu and Caterpillar will want a bigger share of the underground hard-rock business currently dominated by Sandvik and Swedish peer, Epiroc.
Competition, including from China and the industry’s incumbent behemoths, is one headwind Sandvik is going to face as it looks to surpass its impressive mining growth rate of the past five years without transformative platform acquisitions of that period.
CEO Stefan Widing says the company’s 2019-to-2024 track record should indicate it is serious about meeting its targets. He and his senior management team this week gave analysts and investors at Sandvik’s 2025 Capital Markets Day other reasons to believe organic growth, in particular, can transport the company and its dominant mining business (52% of 2024 revenues) to a new financial plane in the next five years.
The forum in Gimo, Sweden, heard divestments and spin-offs (SEK30 billion of exited revenue) and acquisitions (SEK22 billion of new revenue) had produced a “significant business transformation” for the now circa-SEK120 billion-a-year Sandvik group, “[increasing] our margins, increasing our share of aftermarket in our sales [and positioning] us for higher growth”, according to Widing. “It has allowed us to build leading digital platforms to future-proof our businesses”.
“Today we are a growing industrial technology company … with 23 leading businesses.”
Sandvik’s large mining digital business, built around the 2022 Deswik software acquisition and its legacy automation offering, and digital growth on the intelligent manufacturing side of the group, made a SEK5.1 billion contribution to revenues last year. Widing said Sandvik was on track for SEK6.5 billion (US$680 million) this year and now wanted to double this to SEK13b (US$1.35b) in 2030.
“The most difficult part of this journey for us is already done and that is to go from basically nothing [in 2019] to having something,” he said.
“We have the core platforms in place. We will now leverage on the platforms we have … and the majority of the growth will be organic.
“The combination of our traditional hardware with software is a powerful combination that we are uniquely positioned to create value from. Generic software solutions will only take you so far.
“The next wave of productivity in industry will come from combining software and data with hardware and deep application knowledge, be that mining operations or industrial manufacturing. And that is especially true if you want to maximise the impact you can have from AI.”
Widing said bolt-on acquisitions were part of Sandvik’s 2030 vision, along with expansion in regions with higher forecast structural growth, led by India, China and USA. Other key growth areas included niches in downstream mining, demolition and recycling, and expansion in faster growing segments such as aerospace, medical, defence and consumer electronics. In machining tools Sandvik was tied for No.1 in round tools and “we want to build on that”.
In mining specifically division president Mats Eriksson said after an 11% revenue compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2019 to the end of 2024 – a “very successful period” – the company was projecting 8% revenue CAGR to 2030 and a 20-22% adjusted EBITDA margin range (20.4% in 2024).
The past five years had seen Sandvik grow its global installed fleet by more than 45% and increase aftermarket (including technology) contribution to revenue from 62% to 69% – SEK 22 billion to SEK44 billion – even as overall revenues climbed. Eriksson said the company was looking at “high single-digit” growth for aftermarket revenue from 2025-2030.
“Technology is bringing us closer to customers,” he said.
The outlook for the mining market was strong with metals demand expected to outpace supply and push up average prices. But the industry faced major structural challenges from depleting ore grades, deeper mines and potentially shorter-life mines, plus a widening people and skills deficit.
“You need technology,” Eriksson said. “We can provide that technology.
“The technology is there. It is all about the speed of adoption in the market.”
High-priority strategic growth areas were surface drilling, automation and mining software, and electrification. Eriksson said Sandvik had doubled surface mining revenues in the past five years and was forecasting further “double-digit growth in this area”. In mining automation, digitalisation and electrification the company claims to be market leader. “The part that has been growing fastest is digitalisation,” Eriksson said.
Mining digital business president Riku Pulli said more than 1000 Sandvik autonomous machines were delivered and running. The business had “already sold more than 20,000 software licences around the world”. A subscription-based business model meant recurring revenues were high.
“[Digital is] no longer diluting Sandvik margins,” Pulli said. “Quite the opposite actually. We are accretive.”
He expects profitability to remain strong while revenues “keep on growing at double-digit pace [30% CAGR in the past five years]”.
“By 2030 I strongly believe our business will be triple the size of today,” Pulli said.
“It’s a great standalone business … but it’s also a big lever for other Sandvik businesses [equipment and parts].
“The future with mining software is now really exciting because now we have got the platform [and] we have got access to a lot of data. Now is the time to start rolling out artificial intelligence, AI-based apps and so on. We are doing that already in the short term. We have some exciting announcements coming up as well.”
Pulli described the “massively important” acquisition of Deswik in 2022 and follow-up purchase of Australia’s Polymathian in 2023 as a period in which “Sandvik actually decoupled our digital focus a little bit away from equipment alone and instead started focusing on the full end-to-end mining process and value chain”. Last year’s acquisition of Universal Field Robots (UFR), another Australian company, similarly allowed Sandvik “to connect more types of equipment into our AutoMine platform”.
Asked about past Sandvik scepticism about “mixed fleet automation”, Pulli said the company hadn’t changed its core belief that integrating its own equipment and technology produced “the best possible combination”.
“That by far brings the best productivity for the customers,” he said.
“At the same time … from years back we have seen customers want to have mixed fleet [and] different machines connected to the same platform. We want to bring that flexibility to these customers as well. We see that that helps to grow the market significantly for these types of solutions. We are there. We haven’t changed our philosophy … Sandvik AutoMine and Sandvik equipment is the best combination. But over time of course these new technologies with agnostic [connectivity] will become better and better, for sure.”
Eriksson said a slowdown in sales of non-diesel equipment, relative to forecasts, now meant the company’s goal of achieving a 50% battery-electric share of equipment sales by 2030 was unlikely to be achieved. “We think with the slowdown in BEV adoption it will be beyond now 2030,” he said.
“It’s up to the customer to decide what they need.”
He said Sandvik would invest heavily in its technology, factory capacity and operating footprint in the next five years but “very little” of its projected mining business growth was at this stage coming from new acquisitions.
“We believe we can capture SEK100 billion pretty much organically.”
