 JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – "Real" demand for mining equipment had returned, Atlas Copco world president and CEO Ronnie Leten told Mining Weekly Online in Johannesburg on Tuesday.
Leten said that he had noticed a "significant real improvement" in the last four months in particular.
"The timing was around November when you saw more real demand coming through. Before that, there were a lot of activities and talks and assumptions, but in recent months, the improvement has been significant," he said.
A return to normality would, however, require an improvement in the economies of the US, Europe and Japan, which collectively represented two-thirds of the gross national product of the world.
His role as CEO was to keep the organisation sufficiently agile so that it could adapt to both economic downturns and economic upturns , and "both are challenging, I can assure you".
Proof of the company's financial resilience was that it had ended its 2009 financial year with €1,6-billion cash in hand.
In spite of a 50% drop in mining equipment sales, it also continued to design and develop and ended 2009 by launching more new products than ever before.
"It takes a long time to develop top engineers for mining equipment and for tools and compressors. It's insufficient to have masters' degrees from university. Experience and knowledge of customers and applications is key."
He said that South Africa was among the countries where customers continued to drive Atlas Copco to the cutting edge of mining productivity, as did Australia, Chile and the company's home base of Sweden.
"The best for the company is when you have customers who are very ambitious," he added.
The company had been able to bring down the life-cycle cost of its equipment and believed in "waging war" for the development of talent.
"That's our responsibility. We are upgrading the skills of our own young people constantly and also the employees of our customers, not only in South Africa, but wherever we are in the world," he said.
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