CiDi, the Hong Kong-listed Chinese autonomous mining equipment maker, expects overseas deployments to grow this year as it pushes beyond China, Chief Executive Albert Hu told Reuters. The company is selling machines that cut labour and fuel costs while improving safety, and the people who work around mines are the ones expected to absorb the risk, the surveillance, and the replacement.
Who Gets Replaced
CiDi and rivals including Fujian-based EACON are racing to provide self-driving trucks and other mining equipment. Hu said the company is readying robotic explosive-hauling and drilling machines for "very dangerous, very precise" work. He added, "Some of our trucks have robotic arms now. Is it a truck? Or is it a robot? We're blurring the lines between the two." That blur is the point. The machine gets smarter, the operator gets farther away, and the mine keeps moving under tighter control.
CiDi has equipped partially automated autonomous excavators in Australia and is preparing a larger rollout there this year, alongside efforts to land contracts in the Middle East, South America and Europe. Hu said CiDi can grow faster than China's autonomous mining equipment sector and expects overseas markets to contribute a double-digit percentage of revenue next year, up from a low single-digit share. The company, which went public in late 2025, is already using public markets to fuel expansion into more sites, more contracts, and more remote control over extraction.
Who Has the Power
Unlike rivals that operate truck fleets, CiDi sells hardware and software directly to mine operators, leaving manufacturing to partner truck and equipment makers in what Hu called an "asset-light" model. That means the company can spread its system without carrying the full burden of production, while mine operators buy into a setup designed to make extraction cheaper and more automated. The arrangement keeps the profits and the decision-making at the top, while the labor force and the surrounding communities live with the consequences.
CiDi saw its revenue more than double last year to 884.8 million yuan, or $130.6 million. Deployments and revenue grew 374% in China, compared with roughly 73% for China's industry, Hu said. Those numbers show how quickly the machinery of extraction is being reorganized. Faster growth, fewer workers in the cab, and more distance between the people making the decisions and the people exposed to the danger.
At an open-pit quarry in Jurong, Jiangsu province, owned by cement conglomerate TCC Group Holdings, 12 fully electric unmanned trucks moved across the site on Friday, recharging or autonomously hauling limestone to crushing facilities. CiDi says the fleet is the first fully electric and self-driving mining truck fleet. The quarry is a clean, precise image of industrial control: machines hauling stone, charging themselves, and feeding the crushing facilities that keep the whole operation running.
What They're Calling Safety
China leads the world in the use of autonomous mining trucks, with roughly 10% of trucks now driverless. CiDi's global fleet has grown to more than 1,700 vehicles, mostly in China, across 30 quarries and coal mines. A single operator can monitor around 100 trucks remotely, a ratio Hu said can scale further. Coordinating the movement of the fleet, particularly at large coal mines where up to 500 autonomous trucks operate at once, is core to CiDi's edge, Hu said. "That's a very big technological threshold for anyone in this space," he said.
That threshold is built on control. One operator watching 100 trucks from a distance is not liberation from work; it's a tighter command structure, stripped down and digitized. The company presents this as progress because it lowers costs and raises efficiency. The people on the ground get a different version: fewer jobs, more automation, and a system that treats danger as a design problem instead of a condition imposed by extraction itself.
CiDi is also designing robots for blasting and drilling. CiDi-equipped explosive-handling units are expected in the third quarter with drilling robots early next year, starting in Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, provinces where scrutiny has intensified since a gas explosion killed 82 workers at a Shanxi coal mine in May. The timing matters. After 82 workers died, the answer from the industry is more machines, more remote control, and more technology layered over the same brutal business.
CiDi has a distribution partnership with British mining equipment maker MMD Group and is looking to partner with others, including China-based mine operators, as it expands overseas. The company’s growth story runs through partnerships, contracts, and the steady conversion of mines into automated systems. The people at the bottom don’t get to vote on any of it. They just live with the machine.