The Liebherr R 9600 at the Super Pit was sold four years before it arrived

A 633 tonne excavator does not get bought in a meeting. It gets bought by the machines that turned up before it.

Liebherr announced on 28 July that Liebherr-Australia has delivered a Liebherr R 9600 to Northern Star Resources at the Super Pit in Western Australia. It went in on 4 July, it is the first ultra-class Liebherr Northern Star has run, and a second is booked for October. The release also mentions, without making anything of it, that 17 Liebherr machines are already working across Northern Star's operations.

What the Liebherr R 9600 brings to the bench

Liebherr lists the R 9600 at 633 tonnes operating weight with a 37.5 m³ bucket and 1,730 kN of breakout force. Power is two Cummins QSK50s at 2,500 kW, two of Liebherr's own D9812s at 2,700 kW, or a 2,400 kW electric drive. Liebherr-Australia's Brian Boitano says the model is on track to pass a million collective operating hours worldwide.

Four years to climb from 150 tonnes to 600

Northern Star's first Liebherr was an R 9400 in 2022. Then more R 9400s, then R 9150s, then PR 776 dozers, across the Super Pit and Bannockburn. Boitano puts it plainly: "before this, we had primarily supplied 150- and 400-tonne-class solutions at the site."

Read that as a service record, not a sales record. Nobody hands an ultra-class excavator to a supplier they have not already watched fix one at 3am in the Goldfields. This order was earned four years earlier by smaller machines doing their hours, and by whoever answered the phone when one of them stopped.

Why Australia is the R 9600's biggest market

Liebherr says Australia is the biggest market in the world for its 600 tonne excavator. A machine engineered in Germany and France sells more units into Australian pits than anywhere else, so the duty cycles shaping the next version of it get set on hot, abrasive Australian benches. Owners here are not getting a machine built for somebody else's conditions. They are the reference customer.

One line most people will skim past: before the excavator arrived, Liebherr lifted component and spare parts holdings at its Kalgoorlie and Perth branches and put more people into the Kalgoorlie team. That sits in a press release about a machine because Liebherr knows it is the part that closed the deal.

Worth copying if you are ever weighing up big iron. Ask where the nearest component float sits, how many of the parts you need are on that shelf today, and how many people within two hours have pulled your model apart before. The spec sheet will be fine. The spec sheet is always fine.

Source: Liebherr-Australia delivers first R 9600 to Northern Star Resources at the Super Pit, 28 July 2026.