Autonomous leaders: the mining companies leading the way in autonomous vehicles 

Fortescue Metals and Rio Tinto are among the companies best positioned to take advantage of future autonomous vehicles disruption in the mining industry, our analysis shows. 

The assessment comes from GlobalData’s Thematic Research ecosystem, which ranks companies on a scale of one to five based on their likelihood to tackle challenges like autonomous vehicles and emerge as long-term winners of the mining sector. 

According to our analysis, Fortescue Metals, Rio Tinto and BHP are the companies best positioned to benefit from investments in autonomous vehicles, all of them recording scores of five out of five in GlobalData’s Mining Thematic Scorecard. 

The table below shows how GlobalData analysts scored the biggest companies in the mining industry on their autonomous vehicles performance, as well as the number of new autonomous vehicles jobs, deals and patents from the companies since May 2021. 

The final column in the table represents the overall score given to that company when it comes to their current autonomous vehicles position relative to their peers. A score of five indicates that a company is a dominant player in this space, while companies that score less than three are vulnerable to being left behind. These can be read fairly straightforwardly. 

The other data points in the table are more nuanced, showcasing recent autonomous vehicles investment across a range of areas over the past year. These metrics, where available, give an indication of whether autonomous vehicles are at the top of executives’ minds now, but high numbers in these fields are just as likely to represent desperate attempts to catch-up as they are genuine strength in autonomous vehicles. 

For example, a high number of deals could either indicate that a company is dominating the market, or that it is using mergers and acquisitions to fill in gaps in its offering.