Weir is a UK based engineering company specialising in mining technology, including equipment, wear parts and digital solutions for global mining and minerals processing operations.
Could you briefly outline your professional background, as well as your role in transforming Weir to what it is today?
I’ve been at Weir for almost 15 years, nine as chief executive and before that as CFO, with a finance background and a partnership at EY. When I became CEO, I inherited a diversified flow-control conglomerate operating in multiple sectors including mining, upstream oil and gas, power and nuclear.
My immediate view was that we needed focus. We concentrated capital and energy on the business with the best growth opportunity: mining. We sold oil and gas, focused on mining, and acquired ESCO, broadening our footprint from digging in the pit through processing, tailings and concentrate transport—mission-critical equipment and round-the-clock service to keep customers’ operations running.
What is your strategic vision for Weir today?
Chapter one was portfolio transformation to focus on mining. Since completing that around 2021, we’ve been optimising the platform—making a strong business more efficient and scalable, and building a broader array of technologies and growth initiatives as we lean into rising demand for copper and other critical minerals.
The next chapter is delivering growth. For existing mines, that means improving productivity and addressing sustainability challenges – retrofitting and debottlenecking with integrated solutions in extraction, in the processing plant and in tailings. For new, larger mines, it’s about embedding our technologies from the start for higher efficiency, lower CO₂ and careful water management.
Mining must scale up and clean up; our portfolio is built to enable that, and the next few years are about delivering it to market.
In this context, which new products or solutions are most in demand among your customers?
On the hardware side, customer needs boil down to four themes: move less rock, use less energy, use water wisely and create less waste. Across the process, the biggest energy drivers are diesel for haulage and electricity for comminution, so we focus on improving energy efficiency in both.
We’ve developed novel grinding technologies in the mill circuit with our high pressure grinding rolls (HPGR) and new separation and flotation approaches that liberate minerals with less grinding. These generate larger particle sized waste, thereby allowing more effective, lower-cost tailings dewatering. Our “redefined mill circuit” significantly reduces energy, water and CO₂, and is the subject of a World Business Council for Sustainable Development case study. The aim is technologies that avoid emissions and reduce our customers’ CO2 footprint.
Could you provide a live case study demonstrating these technologies in practice, particularly their impact on water consumption?
At the Iron Bridge mine in Western Australia (Fortescue), a magnetite operation in a very water-scarce region, the priority was to drive water out of the process. With a green grid being built, energy was less of a constraint than water cost. The novel flow sheet uses dry grinding with HPGRs, air classification and magnetic separation to minimise water use, and is now ramping up to nameplate capacity.
Another example is the Reko Diq copper-gold project in Pakistan, which is adopting HPGRs instead of traditional SAG mills to cut energy and water in grinding. Mining is conservative, so these reference sites are important for demonstrating performance and encouraging broad adoption in new designs.
This feature explores the race to secure critical minerals. How has rising demand for copper, lithium, nickel and rare earths influenced your product mix and portfolio?
About a quarter of our revenue is currently driven by copper, our largest commodity exposure, and we expect that share to grow as global copper production likely needs to double over the next two decades. Lithium and nickel are smaller today but should grow secularly in a non-linear way, with periods of oversupply and tightness. We work on hard-rock lithium and have distinctive technology used in nickel processing, with notable growth in Indonesia.
Gold has been an added bonus given geopolitics and its role as a store of value. Iron ore should remain strong as renewables, grid build-out and AI data centres expand, with a shift to higher-grade ores like magnetite requiring more processing and beneficiation for green steel. We also see secular growth in minerals enabling fertilisers such as phosphates, while residual exposure to oil sands and coal is in structural decline. Overall, secular demand plus Weir’s new technologies position us well.
Turning to geography, which regions are you prioritising and why? How do jurisdictional risks shape your plans over the next five years?
Weir is already highly diversified and global; we go where our customers need us. We’ve long had a presence in Africa and Argentina, and we’re ready to support miners as they lean back into certain jurisdictions. We’re proud to be within 200 kilometres of every major mine, and we will build presence in places like Pakistan as we support projects such as Reko Diq.
Safety and security of our people are paramount, and we comply with all legal and regulatory frameworks—hence our exit from places like Iran and Russia under sanctions. What customers value is outstanding technology backed by outstanding 24/7 service. Wherever and whenever they need us, we aim to be there with the support to keep operations running.
Finally, where do you envisage Weir by 2030?
Beyond hardware, we see that software, digital and AI will be crucial to making mining more efficient at scale. We’re investing organically and, with the acquisition of Micromine, have a cornerstone for our digital strategy. We expect growth in our core hardware solutions and significant growth in software and digital, as enablers of mining’s scale-up and clean-up.
We see Weir as a key enabler of the energy transition, delivering for investors, our people and customers. By 2030, we want to be recognised for having helped the industry abate negative perceptions and be seen as essential to a better future. We believe we have the tools, capabilities and solutions to contribute meaningfully to that journey.
