Joy Global Inc. was a company that manufactured and serviced heavy equipment used in the extraction and haulage of coal and minerals in both underground and surface mining.

[2][1] The company had manufacturing facilities in Alabama, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin, Australia, Canada, China, France, South Africa, Poland and the United Kingdom.

Concerned that Whitehill lacked the marketing and manufacturing discipline needed to grow, they formed a machine and pattern shop on December 1, 1884.

In 1887, Pawling and Harnischfeger helped rebuild and upgrade an overhead bridge crane within the foundry operations of the Edward P. Allis Manufacturing Company that had collapsed following an attempt to move a load beyond its rated lifting capacity.

The partners decided to expand their product line to include earthmoving machines in order to increase their ability to withstand the next economic downturn.

[7] Harnischfeger launched earth moving machinery line, starting with trenchers and eventually including power shovels and draglines.

By the 1960s and 1970s, the firm had divested its welding, diesel engines, and prefabricated homes businesses in order to concentrate on construction and mining machines, overhead cranes, hoists, and material handling systems.

[10] The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis led to the collapse of a major paper manufacturing business based in Indonesia and the subsequent default on numerous contracts valued in excess of US$5.25 billion.

Joy applies a “life cycle management” strategy to help optimize the utility and potential life of the equipment it designs, builds and supports for underground mining operations, all of which pursue a high-efficiency, high-throughput strategy to obtain lowest-possible cost-per-ton production of coal, salt, trona and other materials.

Life cycle management support includes 24/7 emergency repairs as well as preventive maintenance, performance-enhancing upgrades, rebuilds and relocations, and also remote health monitoring systems aimed at minimizing machine downtime through rapid diagnosis and correction of equipment faults and breakdowns.

P&H shovels, drills and draglines are applied to copper, coal, iron ore, oil sands, gold, phosphates, molybdenum and diamond mining operations.