The future of FLSmidth has been redefined as a pure play mining company, which will renew its focus on sustainability, service and technology.

Speaking during the recent Investing in African Mining Indaba 2023 in Cape Town, FLSmidth Vice President for Mining Site and Service Sales Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and South Asia, Alistair McKay explains that this strategy will enable the business to better service existing and new mining customers.

“We are now very much a mining-focused company,” says McKay. “Moving forward, we are fundamentally more focused on our core technologies – moving away from the engineering project realm and really looking to our innovative products to drive value for our customers.”

He highlights that FLSmidth’s CORE’26 mining strategy prioritises sustainability, service, technology and performance. This provides the platform to pursue its purpose of ‘mining for a sustainable world’ with a mission of ‘delivering solutions for tomorrow’s mine’.

“This direction creates more clarity on where we will direct our resources – and that will be towards moving our best-in-class products forward through our extensive research and development capability,” he says. “As before, this also relies on our close working relationship with our customers, through our technical feedback loop.”

He emphasises the vital role that mining will play in the global energy transition. This, he says will rely on the efforts by mines and their technology partners to evolve sustainable strategies for mining to continue to deliver responsibly.

“Mining will be an essential industry for many years, and we are ensuring that we play our part in the industry’s future – to the 2030 sustainability goals and well beyond,” he says.

This focus on product evolution enhances the value of FLSmidth’s range of offerings within customers’ integrated projects. Venkatesan Punniyamurthy, FLSmidth’s Vice President for Capital Sales in Mining, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and South Asia, notes that the repositioning will see the company’s competence and resources fully focused on their products and their performance.

“As we move toward a more service-centric model, we will continue to work with customers over the full lifecycle of the asset,” says Punniyamurthy. “Even after the equipment is sold and installed, our R&D insights can provide continuous optimisation through digital and other enhancements to our technology.”

Mines can therefore expect an ongoing contribution by FLSmidth to productivity and profitability, with products that also support the achievement of sustainability targets.

Applying innovative technology to the energy-intensive crushing circuit, for instance, can reduce power costs and assist the decarbonisation process. Water saving technologies like filter presses and high pressure grinding rolls (HPGRs) will also play an increasingly important role in conserving water – especially in areas that become drier due to climate change.

McKay says the scope for evolving mining technologies was significant as the world looked to Africa for many of the minerals demanded by a low-carbon future. The Mining Indaba Africa 2023 showed once again that stakeholders in the mining sector – from company shareholders to governments and communities – are expecting steadily more attention to be placed on how responsibly mining in conducted.

“Through our CORE’26 strategy, we are strengthening our role as a global partner for equipment life-cycle performance and sustainability,” he says. “Our strategic acquisitions over the years – including the recent acquisition of thyssenkrupp’s mining business – have created a powerful portfolio of solutions across the flowsheet. Fine-tuning our strategy will allow customers to fully leverage both our decades of experience and our leading technology offering.”