PODCAST | Up to 40% of mining machinery will be autonomous by 2040 in SA: Siemens

The rise of autonomous, tech-driven mining is the focus of this edition of Business Day Spotlight. 

Host Mudiwa Gavaza is joined by Sabine Dall’Omo, CEO of Siemens Sub-Saharan Africa. 

With the Mining Indaba for the year having wrapped up this week, Dall’Omo reflects on some of the big themes at the industry get-together. 

Siemens is a German technology company known for its products and solutions in networking, industrial manufacture, infrastructure, transport and healthcare. 

The company estimates that by 2040, 30%-40% of machinery in SA mining will be autonomous. It expects similar trends across the African continent and that several prominent mining operations will be close to fully automated, marking a new era of enhanced safety, efficiency and productivity.

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Siemens has a big interest in SA’s mining industry, with Dall’Omo explaining that 20%-25% of the company’s business in the country comes from this industry. 

With a rapid decline in direct human interactions on mines, she says the reskilling of mine workers to engage in more meaningful tasks, in line with other industries that are also embracing the fourth industrial revolution (4IR), will become a dominant theme in mining. 

While the shift presents an opportunity to re-focus human efforts on creative, skilled, and less physically taxing work, Dall’Omo says progress in this area is especially slow.

With SA’s mining activities being centred on the extractive elements, there is an opportunity for downstream activities such as beneficiation of minerals. 

As mining operations reduce headcount in favour of technology, workers can be re-skilled for other jobs in related fields such as beneficiation, which refers to the transformation of a primary material, produced by mining, to a more finished product, which has a higher export sales value

Topics of discussion include: reflections of 2025’s Mining Indaba; expected technology mining trends; Siemens’ interest in mining; evolution of SA’s mining sector; and automation. 

Business Day Spotlight is a MultimediaLIVE Production. 

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