MaxMine is a great example of how to take business from South Australia to the world. What’s been core to that success?

Adelaide is a great market for service and construction companies focused on local clients. However, South Australia is relatively small, and while Adelaide boasts significant technical expertise, to truly realise your potential you sometimes need to think about national and global markets. For us, that’s meant focusing on international markets, embracing global best practices and engaging with talent worldwide.

MaxMine earns 100 per cent of our revenue outside of South Australia; currently, there are no mine sites in our target market within the state. Critical to our strategy is maintaining a presence in our key markets such as Perth, Brisbane and Johannesburg, and operating within global mining networks.

Have you noticed an uptick in mining firms looking to MaxMine to improve their sustainability credentials in recent years? Has that been scaling rapidly?

Mine operators face rising costs stemming from increasing operating costs, declining ore grades and new regulations. As a result, their near-term focus has been on digitisation to drive productivity and improve safety and digitisation. Fortunately, particularly in the case of mobile mining equipment, there is a strong correlation between productivity and sustainability; with the majority of productivity improvements reducing energy intensity.

There have been several announcements of plans to implement zero-emission haul trucks on mine sites, yet actual deployment progress remains slow. Currently, there are still no production trials for battery electric vehicles (BEVs) or hydrogen trucks (H2) and one industry hopeful, First Mode, that aimed to retrofit BEVs and H2 to accelerate deployment has unfortunately folded.

Some progress has been achieved with other existing technologies such as electric excavators, which account for a significant 20% of site fuel usage. But considering the current situation and the fact we’re years away from replacing diesel truck fleets, our experience is that clients are focusing on operational efficiency as the principal near-term driver of sustainability.

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How can data help companies in the mining sector achieve net-zero?

With data, mining sites can measure and improve productivity and objectively identify and assess the lowest cost abatement pathways for mining, especially mining haul fleets.

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In the immediate term, the best approach is to focus on productivity. Increased productivity reduces operational waste. By reducing operational waste, the fuel burn per tonne of production significantly decreases, which lowers both cost and emissions.

The goal of “doing more with less” by boosting efficiency and becoming more productive using existing resources naturally improves sustainability. Optimising fuel usage helps reduce both cost and emissions. If we want to achieve net-zero, the mining industry needs to focus on productivity as the major driver of sustainability.

Photo: MaxMine.

What else is happening in tech that is applicable to the important mining sector?

With much excitement around AI, the challenge in mining primarily involves getting access to high-quality, high-resolution operational data and, additionally, the collection of and access to training data. This is the contextual information required to enable AI in mining.

MaxMine has the best and richest operational dataset in the sector, with millions of hours of operational data, and we are in the process of building the contextual/training data sets.

This enables us to:

• Break down equipment use on a second-by-second basis, providing feedback to mining operators, managers, planners and maintenance

• Build productivity improvement tools enabled by rich data

• Measure the carbon benefits of improved productivity

• Target further diesel/carbon reductions

• Provide high-relation fuel burn/carbon intensity data to the planning process to further reduce energy intensity

Leveraging data and emerging technologies such as AI can make mining more efficient and safer and accelerate the sustainability of humanity’s scarce resources.

What were some highlights for MaxMine in 2024?

In 2024, our extensive value tracking and benchmarking capabilities helped us capture some outstanding client outcomes. We saw significant improvements in payload, reductions in unproductive time, off-haul travel and improved driver efficiency across our customer base. For example, our data science platform helped one customer to improve their fill factor, resulting in an additional 612,000 tons of material moved annually without incurring any extra costs or carbon generation.

We also enhanced our safety offering. We now have several sites that have reduced the incidence of high-risk driver behaviours by over 90%, with some sites close to full elimination. This is not only critical for human safety but also leads to smoother driving, which in turn reduces the cost of maintenance and repairs while improving machine availability.

What’s in the pipeline for next year?

For 2025, one of our main goals is to continue refining our deployment model and boost the speed of delivering value to our clients. Additionally, we anticipate continued growth in new clients. This approach will help us improve efficiency and better position MaxMine to meet the evolving needs of our clients more effectively as we scale.

What’s your number one piece of advice for startup founders in Adelaide looking to create a global company?

My number one advice would be to leverage local technical talent. Adelaide has some amazingly skilled people, and there are supportive state government policies to foster and develop local talent. Secondly, it’s crucial to operate to global best practices. This is vital for any exporter of goods and services. Thirdly, always think about global best practice operations. Australia has huge, untapped export potential across various industries, and our national market is quite small compared to the opportunities available overseas.

South Australia punches above in terms of growing successful startups to scaleups and beyond. What’s in the water here that attracts such talented founders?

In South Australia, the innovation ecosystem is driven in part by necessity. With few global head offices here, if you are seeking a global or national leadership role, one option is to create the role yourself and found a business.

People who wish to pursue this path are supported by a strong local talent pool. South Australia has also benefitted from stable policy, with centrist governments from both sides retaining successful, common-sense policies to support new businesses.