The surface and underground mining equipment manufacturer is promoting its new Hunter Valley facility at the Asia-Pacific International Mining Exhibition, held at Sydney Showground.

Located in Rutherford, Joy Global's facility will offer administration support, services and training, a warehouse and repair shops for its mining clients in the Hunter Valley region in New South Wales.

Joy Global will close four smaller facilities in the region, combining them into one facility.

The Hunter Valley facility will service surface and underground mining products.

Four different bays at the facility will repair electric motors, mechanical and wheel motors, underground products and large fabrications.

Joy Global operations manager Hunter Valley Collin Slattery said the facility was designed for customers and customer training onsite.

“The facility was built based on our global standards, which encompasses all our products,” Slattery said.

“We're based in Milwaukee, US, and the first facility created is in the iron range in Minnesota. This facility is almost identical to the Hunter Valley facility, except we're doing underground work here as well.”

Slattery said most of his company's customers were within an hour’s drive from the new facility.

The facility's administration segment consists of more than 60 employees – including service, project and regional teams.

It encompasses a Smart Services building, with a 24-hour control room to monitor Joy Global equipment at different mines.

The Smart Services training area includes a range simulators, to teach cleanskins how to operate Joy Global products.

A warehouse at the site will provide support for the different repair bays located at the facility, and fix or maintain electric motors.

Bay 1 at Hunter Valley will focus on hazardous type equipment repairs, as well as Joy Global's surface range of P&H draglines and shovel electric motor rebuilds.

“It's a pretty big and busy site, we've got over 50 Eilbeck cranes in there,” Slattery said.

“Bay 2 is a larger type mechanical repair shop, including a 35-tonne crane. We do wheel motor and off-highway rebuilds, as well as gear box rebuilds.”

Bay 3 is used for refurbishing underground equipment including continuous miners, shuttle cars, feeder breakers and longwall equipment.

Inside is a 75t crane, a 40t and a 10t crane, while Bay 4 is designed for draglines and shovel buckets.

Joy Global's head office will remain in Maitland. It also has its East Rutherford workshop and Thornton warehouse.

The company recently announced an unchanged quarterly cash dividend of 18c per share for the third quarter.

The dividend is payable on September 18 to shareholders on record on September 4.