Zijin Mining: China's Copper-and-Gold Colossus Goes Global

I. Introduction & Episode Roadmap

Start with a map, because the map is the story.

Put a pin in Shanghang County, Fujian — a subtropical, hilly, unremarkable place in southeastern China, better known for tobacco and ancestral Hakka villages than for industrial ambition. Now start dropping pins everywhere else. One in the Katanga plateau of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the richest new copper discovery of the twenty-first century sits under red laterite soil. One in Bor, eastern Serbia, on top of a smelter complex that Tito's Yugoslavia built and post-socialist Serbia nearly let die. One at 5,000 metres in the mountains of Tibet, where the air holds roughly half the oxygen of sea level and where China's largest copper mine now runs. Pins in Colombia, Suriname, Guyana, Papua New Guinea, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Australia, Argentina, Ghana, Peru.

That is Zijin Mining Group Company Limited — 紫金矿业集团股份有限公司 — a company that in 2025 turned over US$49.7 billion in revenue and earned RMB 51.8 billion (about US$7.4 billion) in net profit attributable to shareholders, a 62% jump on the prior year.¹ It produced 1.09 million tonnes of mined copper and 90 tonnes of mined gold that year, placing it in the top handful of producers of both metals globally.¹ Its market value has spent 2026 in the region of US$120 billion and above, which puts it in the same conversation as BHP and Rio Tinto — companies with a century-plus head start.²

Here is the hook. Most Western investors have never heard of Zijin. Yet Zijin co-owns Kamoa-Kakula, one of the largest and highest-grade copper discoveries on Earth, alongside a Canadian junior run by a famous prospector. It bought that position in 2015 for US$412 million — roughly what a mid-tier miner might spend on a single mid-life expansion.³ And eight months ago, the geologist who built the entire thing over 32 years walked out the door.

On December 31, 2025, founder Chen Jinghe (陈景河) ceased to be Chairman of Zijin Mining. He is now "Lifetime Honorary Chairman and Senior Advisor," and the board is led by a career insider named Zou Laichang (邹来昌).⁴ Four months later, Chen surfaced as an advisor to 宁德时代 CATL, the world's largest battery maker, helping it build out a mining arm — a striking signal about where a man who spent three decades finding copper and gold thinks the next scarcity lies.⁵

So this is a story about a succession, but it is also a story about a machine. Over roughly fifteen years, Zijin built a repeatable process: buy complexity and distress that Western majors will not touch, build fast, and let the commodity cycle do the rest. The question every long-term investor should be asking is whether that machine belonged to the founder or to the institution.

The roadmap: the origins at Zijinshan; the overseas buying spree from 2010 to 2018; copper as the crown jewel; the gold empire and its 2025 spin-off; the lithium bet; the leadership handover and its first real test; the state question; the risk radar; the competitive war-game; and finally, what would have to be true for the bull case to hold — and what would break it.

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II. Origins: Zijinshan and the Geologist Who Found Gold Under Copper

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a young geologist named Chen Jinghe spent his field seasons walking a mountain in Fujian called Zijinshan — 紫金山, "Purple Gold Mountain." The name was aspirational rather than descriptive. Chinese prospectors had known about the hill for centuries; the Song dynasty had reportedly worked gold there. Modern state geological surveys had looked at it repeatedly and concluded roughly the same thing each time: there was copper in the mountain, and it was too low-grade and too complicated to be worth much.

Chen read the same rocks differently. His argument, which he pushed for years against institutional consensus, was that the deposit was zoned — that the copper mineralisation the surveys kept measuring sat beneath a large, oxidised gold cap that everyone had been walking over. Get the sequencing right, mine the gold first with cheap heap-leach methods, use that cash flow to fund the harder copper underneath, and an "uneconomic" mountain becomes a business.

This is the single most important fact about Zijin's DNA, and it is worth sitting with. The founding insight was not a financial insight or a political one. It was a technical claim about ore geometry, made by a person who was willing to be wrong in public. Everything that followed — the appetite for assets that other people had already priced as failures, the confidence that Zijin's own engineers could re-cut someone else's mine plan — is downstream of a young geologist deciding that the previous surveys had asked the wrong question.

From county bureau to joint-stock company

The corporate vehicle started in 1986 as the Shanghang Mineral Company, a county-owned outfit with the resources you would expect of a county-owned outfit in rural Fujian in the mid-1980s: almost none. Chen took over the operation in 1993, and the restructuring that followed gave technical staff and management an equity stake — an early and, at the time, genuinely unusual experiment in Chinese enterprise reform. It matters because it set the ownership template that persists today: a local-government anchor shareholder alongside a broad base of employee and public holders, rather than a central-government SOE structure.

Two capital-markets events funded everything that came after. Zijin listed H-shares in Hong Kong in 2003, and then A-shares in Shanghai in 2008. Management has consistently framed these as the company's first and second "capital-markets milestones," and the framing is not marketing: the Hong Kong listing gave a county mining company a hard-currency balance sheet and the credibility to bid for foreign assets, and the Shanghai listing gave it the domestic equity base to take real risk.

Why the old history stays short

It would be easy to spend an hour on the 1990s. Resist it. The economically relevant Zijin — the one that owns a quarter of a Congolese copper giant and the largest copper mine in China — is almost entirely a creation of the period after 2010. What the origin story explains is temperament, not scale: a company that believes technical judgment can find value in rocks other people have written off, run by a founder who was personally validated by exactly that bet, sitting on top of a domestic cash generator that could fund experiments abroad.

That temperament was about to be pointed at the rest of the world, at the precise moment the rest of the world stopped wanting mining assets.

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III. The Overseas Buying Spree Begins (2010–2018): Buying Distressed and Unloved Assets

Picture the mining industry in 2013. The China-driven supercycle has cracked. Copper is falling, gold has just had its worst year in three decades, and the CEOs who spent 2010 and 2011 overpaying for growth are being fired one after another — at Rio Tinto, at Anglo American, at Barrick. The instruction from Western boards and shareholders is uniform and absolute: no more acquisitions, cut capex, sell non-core assets, return cash, apologise.

Into that vacuum walked a Chinese company with a domestic cash engine, an equity market that still rewarded growth, and a founder who had built his career on the belief that other people's discarded assets were mispriced.

The proof-of-concept deals

Zijin's first moves abroad were deliberately small and deliberately awkward. In 2011, it paid roughly US$66 million for 60% of Altynken, a gold project in Kyrgyzstan, operating alongside the state-owned Kyrgyzaltyn — a jurisdiction with a track record of revoking mining licences and a partner that was, functionally, the government. In 2012 it moved on Norton Gold Fields in Western Australia, taking control and then buying out the rest in 2015. Kyrgyzstan taught Zijin how to operate where the state is your partner and your regulator simultaneously. Australia taught it how to run a mine inside a first-world compliance regime. Both lessons compound later.

Then came the deal that showed Zijin could sit at the same table as a Western major. In 2015 it paid US$298 million for half of Barrick (Niugini) Limited, the vehicle that held the Porgera gold mine in Papua New Guinea — a rare 50/50 joint venture between a Chinese miner and a top-tier Western operator. Porgera is also the earliest warning in this story: in April 2020 the PNG government declined to renew the special mining lease, shutting the mine down for more than three years. It only resumed production on December 22, 2023, and only after the ownership was restructured so that PNG stakeholders hold 51% and the Barrick-Zijin joint venture holds 49%, with 53% of the economic benefits flowing to the PNG side.⁶⁷

Read that outcome carefully, because it recurs: Zijin got the mine back, but it got it back on materially worse terms than it bought. Political risk in this business does not usually arrive as outright expropriation. It arrives as renegotiation.

Serbia: the bargain that defined the playbook

The purest expression of the strategy came in Serbia in 2018. RTB Bor was a socialist-era copper mining and smelting complex that had been effectively insolvent for two decades, carrying more than a billion euros of eventually written-off debt, with a string of failed privatisation attempts behind it. It had ore, a smelter, and 5,000 employees the Serbian state could not afford to lay off.

Zijin signed the final documents on December 18, 2018 to take 63% of the company, with a pledged capital-investment programme of US$1.26 billion over six years.⁸ Industry commentary at the time was blunt about the economics; one trade write-up was literally titled "Bargain acquisition of Serbia copper company by Zijin." What Zijin actually bought was not a mine so much as a permission structure: a brownfield licence area, an operating smelter, and a government that badly needed the deal to work.

It then bolted on the piece that made Serbia strategically important. In September 2018 Zijin agreed to acquire Canada's Nevsun Resources for C$1.86 billion — roughly €1.2 billion — funded in significant part by a share issue of about US$1.16 billion.[^9]⁹ Nevsun's prize was Čukaru Peki, part of the Timok project: an extraordinarily high-grade copper-gold deposit sitting essentially next door to the Bor infrastructure Zijin had just acquired. Cheap smelter plus high-grade orebody is not two deals. It is one deal, executed in two steps, in the same year.

Kamoa: the option that became the company

The most consequential purchase of the period looked, at the time, like the least certain. In 2015 Ivanhoe Mines — Robert Friedland's vehicle — had made a genuinely world-class copper discovery in the DRC and was running out of money to develop it. On December 8, 2015, Zijin completed the acquisition of 49.5% of Kamoa Holding for US$412 million, paid half at closing and half in five instalments.³

Four hundred and twelve million dollars. For roughly half of what would become one of the three largest copper mining complexes on the planet. That single line item is the strongest available evidence for the Zijin thesis, and it is worth being honest about why it was available at that price: because in 2015, "unproven orebody, Democratic Republic of Congo, capital-constrained junior partner" was a combination that made Western investment committees say no. Zijin's advantage was not superior geology. It was a willingness to underwrite a risk the market was refusing to price.

The pattern — and the test to apply to it

Across roughly 13 overseas transactions since 2010, Zijin deployed on the order of RMB 7.9 billion of deal spend abroad, more than double what it spent domestically over the same period. The common thread is not a commodity or a geography. It is a seller state: a government privatising a liability, a junior facing a financing wall, a Western major deleveraging after a write-down.

The honest analytical caution is that this playbook has never been separated from the commodity cycle. Buying distressed assets in 2015 and holding them into the copper and gold prices of 2025 would have made almost any buyer look brilliant. The genuine test — which we will apply repeatedly through the rest of this story — is whether Zijin's returns came from timing or from execution: did it merely buy cheap, or did it also build faster and cheaper than the seller could have?

Serbia and the DRC give the clearest answer. Let us go there.

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IV. Copper Becomes the Crown Jewel: Julong, Kamoa-Kakula, and the Race to Scale

On January 23, 2026, at an altitude above 5,000 metres in Xizang (Tibet), Zijin switched on Phase 2 of the Julong Copper Mine (驱龙铜矿).¹⁰

To understand what that sentence means physically: at 5,000 metres, air pressure is roughly half of sea level. Diesel engines lose power. Concrete cures differently. Workers cycle in and out on shortened rotations because sustained heavy labour at that altitude is medically hazardous. Winter construction windows are short. And in this environment, Zijin took a concentrator from 150,000 tonnes of daily ore throughput to 350,000 tonnes — more than doubling it — in about 18 months from approval to production.¹⁰[^12]

The design capacity now exceeds 100 million tonnes of ore processed per year, and Julong's copper output is guided toward 300,000 to 350,000 tonnes annually.[^12] Zijin has publicly floated a Phase 3 that would, if built, make Julong the largest copper mine in the world by output, and it has framed Xizang as an 800,000-tonne-a-year copper province in its own right.¹⁰

Why Julong is the more revealing asset

Kamoa gets the headlines because the grades are spectacular. Julong is the better window into what Zijin actually is.

Julong's ore grades roughly 0.29% copper — low, by any global standard.¹¹ A porphyry deposit at that grade is a volume business: you are not mining copper so much as mining rock, and the entire economics rest on moving and grinding enormous tonnages at very low unit cost. That is an engineering and logistics problem, not a geological one. Doing it at 5,000 metres, in 18 months, is the single clearest evidence in the company's portfolio that Zijin's advantage is at least partly real capability rather than pure cycle timing.

The acquisition history matters too. Zijin bought 50.1% of Julong in 2020 for RMB 3.88 billion (roughly US$548 million), from a seller group that included entities affiliated with Zangge Mining (藏格矿业).¹¹ Five years later, in January 2025, it went back and bought control of Zangge itself for RMB 13.73 billion, explicitly consolidating its economic ownership of Julong — a move we will return to when we discuss lithium, because the same transaction did both jobs.¹²¹³

Kamoa-Kakula: the crown jewel and its crack

Meanwhile, in Congo, the option Zijin bought in 2015 was becoming a monster. The Phase 3 concentrator came online in May 2024 ahead of schedule, and the on-site smelter poured its first anode copper in December 2025.[^16] Kamoa-Kakula produced 437,000 tonnes of copper in 2024 and is routinely described as the third-largest copper mining complex in the world behind Escondida and Grasberg, with a stated pathway toward 800,000 tonnes a year.[^16]

The ownership is 39.6% Ivanhoe Mines, 39.6% Zijin, 20% the DRC government, and 0.8% others.[^16] Note the structure: neither commercial partner controls it, and the state is a permanent 20% participant.

Then, in May 2025, the crown jewel cracked.

Seismic activity in the eastern section of the Kakula underground mine forced management to suspend operations on May 18, 2025.¹⁴ Water inflows followed. Underground activity was suspended again on May 25, with all employees brought to surface and mobile equipment withdrawn.¹⁵ Ivanhoe cut 2025 copper guidance for the complex to 370,000–420,000 tonnes from a prior 520,000–580,000 tonnes — roughly a 28% reduction at the midpoint — and withdrew its 2026 forecast entirely.¹⁶

For an investor, this is the moment in the story where an abstraction ("political risk in the DRC") gets replaced by something harder to hedge. Deep underground mining at high extraction ratios induces stress redistribution in the rock mass. Sometimes that stress releases as a seismic event. This is a known hazard in deep mines worldwide and it is not a governance failure — but it is a reminder that the asset carrying the largest share of Zijin's growth narrative has a geological tail risk that no amount of deal-making skill mitigates.

An underrated governance signal: the partners disagreed in public

There is a detail from that week that deserves more attention than it received. On May 23, 2025, Ivanhoe Mines issued a press release titled, in effect, a correction of its partner: it publicly disputed Zijin's characterisation of the damage. Zijin had described "multiple roof-falling and rib-spalling" in the eastern section; Ivanhoe said its underground inspection found no evidence of collapsing stopes or structural pillars, and attributed the damage to seismically-induced scaling from sidewalls.¹⁷

Two 39.6% shareholders in the world's third-largest copper complex issuing contradictory technical descriptions of the same underground event, within days, in public, is not a normal disclosure environment. For minority shareholders of either company, it is a live reminder that a 50/50-style joint venture with no controlling partner means information reaches the market through two competing channels. It is also, to be fair to Zijin, evidence that the company was not simply parroting its partner's line.

Where copper sits in the business

Copper is roughly a quarter of Zijin's revenue but a much larger share of gross profit, and it is where management has explicitly staked the next decade. In February 2026 the board approved a three-year plan for 2026–2028 that targets mined copper output of 1.50–1.60 million tonnes by 2028, up from 1.09 million tonnes in 2025 and 1.20 million tonnes guided for 2026 — with the explicit stated ambition of ranking among the world's top three copper producers.¹⁸¹

That target pulls forward a goal previously framed around 2030 by roughly two years. Investors should treat pulled-forward targets with a specific kind of scepticism: acceleration is easy to announce when commodity prices are at records and hard to deliver when they are not. The counter-evidence in Zijin's favour is that a large share of the 2028 volume is not speculative. Julong Phase 2 is already running. Kamoa's Phase 3 and smelter are already built. The Zhunuo copper mine in Tibet was targeted to start before the end of 2026.¹⁹ This is a target backed substantially by metal already in commissioned circuits, which is a meaningfully different proposition from a target backed by permits and feasibility studies.

The 2026 half-year print gave a first partial read. Zijin pre-announced first-half 2026 mined copper of 534,000 tonnes, with output from mines other than Kamoa-Kakula up 5% year on year.¹⁹ That phrasing is itself informative — the company chose to disclose growth excluding its most troubled asset, which is transparent and unflattering at the same time.

Serbia's second act

Serbia has quietly become Zijin's second copper pillar. Trial production at Čukaru Peki's Upper Zone began in 2021, with roughly US$474 million invested in the underground mine by mid-2023, and management targeting combined Serbian copper capacity in the region of 450,000 tonnes a year.

The unresolved question is the Lower Zone. The Upper Zone is high-grade and shallow enough for relatively conventional underground methods. The Lower Zone is a much larger, much lower-grade porphyry that would require block caving or a similarly capital-intensive bulk method — an approach that involves undercutting an orebody and letting gravity break it, which is cheap per tonne once running and extremely expensive and slow to establish. Zijin has not publicly and fully costed that transition. For a company whose stated edge is capital efficiency, an uncosted multi-billion-dollar mining-method decision sitting inside its second-largest copper region is a genuine gap in disclosure.

The competitive frame

On 2024 mined copper, the global league table ran roughly: BHP around 1.87 million tonnes, Freeport around 1.86 million tonnes on a sales basis, Codelco around 1.33 million tonnes, Zijin around 1.07 million tonnes, Southern Copper around 974,000 tonnes, Glencore around 952,000 tonnes, and CMOC (洛阳钼业) around 650,000 tonnes after a 55% surge that took it into the top ten.

Two things stand out. First, Zijin's absolute position is strong but not dominant. Second — and this is the number that actually matters — its growth rate is the outlier. Zijin has compounded copper output at roughly 24% a year over five years while BHP, Freeport, Codelco and Glencore have been flat to declining. Codelco in particular has spent the decade fighting grade decline and a multi-billion-dollar underground conversion programme at Chuquicamata and El Teniente. When the incumbents are running hard to stand still, a challenger growing volume at double digits is taking structural share.

On cost, Zijin has cited a copper C1 cash cost of US$0.93 per pound for 2024, a 14% year-on-year reduction, and claims a position in the best 20th percentile globally.²⁰ Two cautions for anyone quoting that figure. It is company-disclosed and should be checked against the primary annual report rather than press summaries. And C1 is a cash-cost measure that excludes sustaining capital — for a company building at Zijin's pace, the gap between C1 and any all-in measure is unusually wide. Top-quintile is a good cost position. It is not a top-decile, structurally unassailable one.

The industry backdrop

Copper's demand case barely needs restating: electrification, grid rebuild, data centres, EVs, and the simple physics that moving electrons requires metal. The supply case is the interesting half. New large copper deposits are increasingly found in places with weak institutions, permitting timelines in the good jurisdictions now routinely exceed a decade, and grades globally are falling.

That structure hands an advantage to whoever is willing and able to build in difficult places, quickly. Zijin's edge in copper is not that it finds better rocks. It is that its cost of saying yes — political, reputational, bureaucratic — is lower than its Western competitors'. That is a real advantage. It is also, as Porgera showed and as the DRC will show later, an advantage that gets partially clawed back by host governments over time.

The same instincts built something even larger in gold — and then, in 2025, Zijin did something with it that no other major miner did.

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V. The Gold Empire and Its 2025 Spin-Off

On the morning of September 30, 2025, a new ticker appeared on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange: 2259.HK, Zijin Gold International. By the close of the first session it had risen more than 60% above its offer price.²¹

The listing raised roughly HK$25 billion — about US$3.2 billion — making it the largest gold-mining IPO ever completed anywhere and the largest Hong Kong listing of 2025.²² The debut pop valued the entity at something in the order of US$41 billion, comfortably above the "north of US$30 billion" management had been signalling to investors before the deal.²¹ Zijin's own communications framed it as the third capital-markets milestone in the company's history, after Hong Kong in 2003 and Shanghai in 2008 — a deliberate placement of the spin-off in the same category as the listings that funded the company's creation.

That framing is worth interrogating, because a spin-off is not a listing. A listing raises primary capital for a business that did not have it. A spin-off re-labels assets you already own and asks the market to pay a different multiple for them. Whether that is value creation or financial cosmetics depends entirely on what the parent does next.

What went into the box

Zijin Gold International was assembled from eight overseas gold mines: Buriticá in Colombia, Norton Gold Fields in Australia, Rosebel in Suriname, Aurora in Guyana, Jilau/Taror in Tajikistan, Akyem in Ghana, Left Bank in Kazakhstan, and the Porgera interest in Papua New Guinea. Buriticá alone accounts for a substantial slice of output, and the top handful of assets contribute the clear majority of the entity's production.

Nearly every one of those mines arrived through the same distressed-seller channel that built the copper portfolio.

Continental Gold (Buriticá), Colombia. Zijin agreed to acquire the company for C$1.33 billion — roughly US$1.0 billion — completing in March 2020, right as the pandemic froze global markets.²³ Continental had a spectacular high-grade orebody and a security problem it could not solve.
Guyana Goldfields (Aurora). Acquired in 2020 for about C$323 million (roughly US$238 million) after the company missed guidance, cut its reserve estimate, and went through a bruising boardroom fight.²⁴ Zijin bought it in the middle of the wreckage.
Rosebel, Suriname. Purchased from IAMGOLD for US$360 million in cash, closing in 2023, while IAMGOLD was deleveraging to fund cost overruns at its Côté project in Canada. Textbook forced seller.
Akyem, Ghana. Acquired from Newmont as the American major pruned its portfolio after its own large-scale consolidation.

The pattern is now familiar enough to be predictive. Zijin does not typically win competitive auctions for prime assets. It buys from people who need to sell.

The scale that resulted

Gold has been Zijin's single largest revenue line — roughly 42% of revenue in FY2024 on 73 tonnes of mined output — and the growth since has been steep.²⁵ Mined gold reached 90 tonnes in 2025, up 23%, driven by Akyem, Shanxi Zijin, the Serbian operations, Raygorodok in Kazakhstan and La Arena in Peru.¹ Guidance for 2026 is 105 tonnes, and the three-year plan targets 130–140 tonnes by 2028 — a figure raised by nearly a third from the 100–110 tonne target set in 2024.¹⁸

Put 90 tonnes into the global frame: that is roughly 2.9 million ounces. Newmont, the largest producer in the world, mines on the order of 5.5 million ounces; Barrick around 3.9 million; Agnico Eagle around 3.5 million in a record year at an all-in sustaining cost near US$1,239 an ounce. Zijin has moved from a domestic Chinese gold miner to within reach of the Western majors in about two decades. Its domestic peers — 招金矿业 Zhaojin Mining and 山东黄金 Shandong Gold — remain smaller and far more China-concentrated, which is precisely the point: Zijin's differentiation among Chinese gold miners is that it went abroad and they largely did not.

On cost, the company has cited an all-in sustaining cost of US$1,438 per ounce for 2024, describing it as the sixth-lowest among the top 15 global gold miners.²⁰ Same caveat as with copper: that is a company-sourced ranking, and it should be verified against the annual report before being treated as fact. A sixth-place cost ranking is respectable and unremarkable — it is not a moat.

The first evidence on whether the spin-off worked

Ten months in, there is a real data point. For the six months to June 30, 2026, Zijin Gold International reported revenue of US$3.99 billion, up about 100% year on year, and profit attributable to owners of US$1.45 billion, up roughly 179%. Mined gold output rose 44% to 27.3 tonnes. Net operating cash flow rose more than fourfold, cash balances climbed to US$3.87 billion, gearing fell, and the board declared a maiden interim dividend of HK$1.50 per share.²⁶

Some of that is simply the gold price, which has been extraordinary. But a 44% volume increase is not the gold price, and a balance sheet that de-gears while output grows is the specific combination that separates operational improvement from commodity luck.

The strategic logic — and the strategic tell

The stated rationale for the spin-off was valuation: overseas gold assets buried inside a diversified Chinese miner get valued as part of a conglomerate, not as a pure-play gold producer with Western-comparable disclosure. Separating them lets a different investor base — global gold funds, ETFs indexed to gold equities — own them directly.

The unstated rationale is more interesting. A separately listed subsidiary with its own currency and its own balance sheet is an acquisition vehicle. It can issue shares, raise debt against its own cash flows, and buy things without consuming the parent's capacity. Zijin has effectively built a second engine.

That thesis was tested almost immediately, and the result was a surprise. In January 2026, Zijin Gold International agreed to acquire Allied Gold Corporation in an all-cash deal at C$44 per share — approximately C$5.5 billion, or US$4.01 billion.²⁷ It would have been one of the largest gold acquisitions in years and would have taken the entity deep into Mali, where Allied's Sadiola mine represents roughly half of its output.

It did not happen. Chinese regulators — specifically the National Development and Reform Commission — did not clear the transaction. Reporting through the spring indicated the NDRC had questioned the premium being paid and the concentration of exposure to Mali.²⁸ The closing deadline slipped from late April to May 29, then to July 29, 2026. On that date, both companies announced formal termination of the arrangement agreement. Allied Gold's chief executive Peter Marrone told reporters that "the initial feedback that I have is that there's been no approvals in that period of time," characterising it as a broad policy decision rather than a company-specific rejection. Allied's Toronto-listed shares fell 18.6% that day. Zijin instead agreed to take a 9.2% minority stake — about 12.8 million shares at US$32.55 each, roughly US$417 million, a 10.3% premium to the prior close.²⁹

This is one of the most important facts in the entire Zijin story, and it postdates most of the analysis written about the company.

Read it as an investor. The bull case for the spin-off was "second engine for M&A." The first time that engine was fired at full throttle, it was shut off — not by the target, not by the market, but by Beijing. Zijin Gold International's ability to deploy capital is not a function of its balance sheet alone. It is a function of Chinese outbound-investment policy, which is opaque, discretionary, and not disclosed to minority shareholders in advance.

There is a second, more charitable reading, and it deserves equal weight: a regulator that questions the price a Chinese buyer pays for a Malian gold mine is, in that instance, doing something like what a disciplined board would do. The termination cost Zijin a break in momentum. It also stopped it from paying a large premium for concentrated exposure to a country where the mining code has been in active dispute with foreign operators. Whether that was capital discipline or industrial policy is unknowable from outside — and the fact that it is unknowable is itself the finding.

Gold, then, is Zijin's most mature story and its most financially conventional one. The newest bet is neither.

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VI. The New Bet: Lithium and "Two Lakes, Two Mines"

In the high desert of Catamarca province in northwest Argentina, at roughly 4,000 metres, there is a salt flat called Tres Quebradas. It looks like nothing — a white crust over brine. Under it sits one of the more attractive lithium resources in the so-called Lithium Triangle, where Argentina, Chile and Bolivia hold the majority of the world's brine-hosted lithium.

Zijin bought it at close to the worst possible moment for a seller and the best possible moment for a buyer. It agreed to acquire Neo Lithium Corp, owner of the 3Q project, for C$918.7 million — about US$737 million — at C$6.50 a share in cash, closing in January 2022.³⁰ The resource is on the order of 7.6 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent. First lithium carbonate production is now flowing.

Why a copper-gold company is buying brine

The strategic logic is easier to see than the financial logic. Lithium is not remotely material to Zijin's current earnings. But management has stated an ambition to become a leader in the lithium sector by 2028 and one of the world's most significant producers within five years. The honest way to frame this for investors is as a call option: small capital committed today, large payoff if lithium demand compounds the way electrification implies, limited downside if it does not.

Zijin describes the portfolio as "two lakes, two mines" — two brine operations and two hard-rock deposits. Beyond Argentina, the domestic legs are:

Lakkor Tso (拉果错), Tibet — RMB 4.9 billion for a 70% interest in one of China's few large-scale, high-grade lithium salars. Domestic supply of a strategically designated mineral, in a jurisdiction where Zijin already operates at altitude.
Zangge Mining (藏格矿业) — announced January 16, 2025, at RMB 35 per share for a 24.82% interest, a total of RMB 13.73 billion, taking Zijin to 25% and, with governance arrangements, effective control.¹²¹³ Control completed on April 30, 2025, and the board and senior management were reconstituted on May 22, 2025.¹³

The Zangge transaction is the one to study, because it is the clearest illustration of how Zijin thinks. Press coverage at the time framed it as a lithium deal. It was at least as much a copper deal: Zangge-affiliated entities had been among the original sellers of Julong, and buying Zangge consolidated Zijin's economic ownership of China's largest copper mine.¹² It also added potash — a designated strategic mineral in China — to the portfolio. One cheque, three objectives.

That is not diversification for its own sake. It is a company using a single transaction to tidy up a control structure, add a strategic commodity, and buy an option on lithium simultaneously. Whether it works is a separate question, but the design is coherent.

What the numbers say so far

The scale-up has been abrupt. Lithium output was 25,500 tonnes LCE in 2025.¹ Guidance for 2026 is 120,000 tonnes.¹ In the first half of 2026, output reached 43,000 tonnes — a 514% increase year on year — and management began describing lithium as a "third growth pillar" alongside gold and copper.¹⁹ A first-phase lithium smelter at Manono was scheduled for completion in December 2026.¹⁹

Two observations for investors. First, a 514% increase off a small base is arithmetic, not achievement; the meaningful test is whether the 120,000-tonne full-year target is met, and at what cost per tonne. Second, "third growth pillar" is new language. Management describing a business as a pillar before it is material to earnings is exactly the kind of narrative escalation worth logging and checking against the next several disclosures.

The honest sizing: lithium remains a rounding error against copper and gold revenue today, and lithium prices have been through a brutal cycle that has destroyed a great deal of capital elsewhere in the industry. Zijin's position is defensible precisely because it was bought cheaply during that downturn — the same instinct as Serbia, as Kamoa, as Buriticá, applied to a different metal. Treat it as optionality with real assets behind it, not as a growth engine you can underwrite today.

And note who else has just concluded that battery metals are where the scarcity is: the founder himself.

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VII. The End of the Chen Jinghe Era: Current Management, Incentives, and Credibility

The announcement was dated the last day of the year, which is either a coincidence or a very deliberate piece of symbolism.

Effective December 31, 2025, Chen Jinghe ceased to serve as Chairman of Zijin Mining Group. He declined nomination as a board candidate, citing his age — 68 — and family reasons. He was appointed Lifetime Honorary Chairman and Senior Advisor. Zou Laichang was elected the company's ninth chairman. Lin Hongfu (林泓富) was appointed President and Vice Chairman.⁴³¹

Thirty-two years after he took over a county mining company and told people the surveys had misread the mountain, the geologist stepped back from a business worth more than a hundred billion dollars.³²

The man who left

Chen's career is unusual among the founders of large Chinese enterprises in that his authority was fundamentally technical. He was not a financier or a political operator who acquired mines; he was a geologist whose first major professional act was a contrarian reading of an orebody, and who then spent three decades making the same kind of bet at progressively larger scale. That background shows up in the company's behaviour: Zijin's characteristic move is to buy an asset that someone else has declared marginal and then re-engineer it — a heap leach where others planned a mill, a bigger throughput than the previous owner's study contemplated, a faster construction schedule than the consultants recommended.

The postscript is remarkable. In April 2026, reports emerged that Chen had joined 宁德时代 CATL as an advisor to its mining business, as the battery maker moves to secure more direct control of its raw-material supply chain.⁵³³ He remains honorary chairman and senior consultant at Zijin.

Consider what that says. The man who spent thirty years learning where copper and gold are hiding chose, at 68, to spend his next chapter helping a battery company find lithium and nickel. It is not a signal about Zijin's prospects — Zijin's copper is not going anywhere — but it is a data point about where the world's most experienced mine-builders now think the binding constraint sits.

The men who took over

Both successors are lifers, which is the single most important thing to know about them.

Zou Laichang joined Zijin in 1996 — three years after Chen took charge — and rose through the technical side of the business. He served as Chief Engineer from 2003 to 2006, joined the board in 2006, and became Vice Chairman and President in December 2022, three years before ascending to the chair.⁴ The three-year run as President before taking over is the tell: this was a staged, telegraphed succession, not a surprise.

Lin Hongfu joined in 1997, ran the Zijinshan gold smelter and the Bayannur Zijin nonferrous operations, became a Vice President in 2006, and chaired Zijin Gold International from its 2025 listing.⁴ He came up the operating side of gold, and he ran the spin-off before he ran the parent.

Neither is an outside hire. Neither is a family member. Both spent roughly three decades inside the same institution, in technical and operating roles, under the founder. The board that emerged from the transition comprises seven executive directors, one non-executive director, and six independent directors.⁴

The incentive structure

Both executives hold options under the company's 2023 stock option plan — Zou with approximately 5.1 million options and Lin with 3 million.³⁴ Beyond that, Zijin has built an unusually broad equity-participation programme. The board proposed a 2026 Employee Stock Ownership Scheme funded entirely from previously repurchased A shares held in a dedicated account, avoiding any new issuance or transfer of H shares.³⁵ The buyback that funded it was authorised at between RMB 1.5 billion and RMB 2.5 billion of company funds at a maximum price of RMB 41.50 per share, with unused shares to be cancelled after 36 months.³⁶ The scheme extends to several thousand employee "partners."

The structural point matters more than the amounts: funding employee equity from buybacks rather than new issuance means the programme is non-dilutive to existing shareholders. That is a genuinely shareholder-friendly design choice, and it is not universal in Chinese large caps. Both executives also reportedly waived personal incentive-compensation subsidies tied to the buyback price differential — a small gesture, but the kind of small gesture that is easy to skip and therefore mildly informative.

The credibility question

Company messaging has consistently framed the handover as a shift from "founder-driven" to "institution-driven" governance. Citigroup analysts, quoted in press coverage of the transition, described Zijin's competitiveness as "systematic and structural" — the sell-side formulation of the same claim: that the machine does not depend on the man.³²

That is a thesis, not a finding, and it should be treated as untested. Here is how to test it.

The bear worry about founder succession in an acquisitive company is not that the successor will be incompetent. It is that a non-founder chief executive, lacking the founder's personal authority, either (a) avoids the bold, uncomfortable acquisitions that made the company, or (b) overcompensates by doing a large deal to establish himself. Zijin's history has been built almost entirely on option (c): uncomfortable acquisitions that worked.

Eight months in, the record is mixed in an instructive way. The Zou-era board approved an accelerated three-year plan with raised production targets, commissioned Julong Phase 2 on schedule, and sanctioned the largest gold acquisition attempt in the company's history. The last of those was blocked in Beijing rather than abandoned by management. So the early evidence suggests continuity of appetite. What it does not yet show is behaviour under stress — how this team allocates capital when copper is at US$3 a pound instead of a record, when the balance sheet is tighter, and when a distressed seller shows up with an asset that requires the founder's kind of conviction.

The capital allocation record they inherited

One inherited discipline deserves credit. Zijin's dividend has grown alongside the acquisitions rather than instead of them. The FY2024 payout was raised to RMB 10.1 billion, the first time above RMB 10 billion, at roughly a 31.5% payout ratio, against a cumulative payout ratio since the 2003 listing of about 38.6%.²⁵ For 2025, the proposed final dividend was again RMB 10.1 billion, with total dividends for the year of RMB 16 billion — up 58%.¹ In July 2026 the company declared a 2026 interim dividend of RMB 0.42 per share, roughly RMB 11.1 billion in aggregate.³⁷

A company that simultaneously runs an aggressive M&A programme and steadily raises distributions is telling you something specific about its cash generation: the acquisitions are being funded from a combination of operating cash flow, debt capacity and periodic equity issues, not by starving shareholders. Whether that remains true at a lower copper price is the question — and it leads directly to who, ultimately, decides.

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VIII. Governance and the State Question

Here is a question worth asking before you own a share of this company: who is Zijin actually for?

The largest shareholder is Minxi Xinghang State-owned Assets Investment (闽西兴杭国有资产投资经营有限公司), an investment vehicle controlled by the government of Shanghang County, Fujian — the same county where Chen Jinghe walked the mountain.³⁸ Reported holdings have ranged from roughly 22.9% to 24% depending on the date and the source, diluted gradually by successive share issues used to fund acquisitions.³⁸

That number sits in a very particular zone. It is not majority control. But under Chinese company law and Hong Kong listing rules, special resolutions require supermajority support, which means a holder in the low twenties has an effective blocking position on the decisions that matter most: major asset disposals, changes to the articles, large share issues. Minxi Xinghang cannot force Zijin to do things. It can stop Zijin from doing things.

Mixed ownership, in practice

Zijin is therefore neither a private company nor an SOE in the way Western investors typically use those words. It is a genuine mixed-ownership enterprise: a locally-controlled anchor shareholder, a large float across Shanghai and Hong Kong, a broad employee equity base, and a management team promoted entirely from within.

The practical implication — and this is interpretation rather than an attributed fact — is that Zijin's overseas acquisitions plausibly serve two objectives at once. They generate returns for shareholders, and they secure resource supply for a country that is structurally short of copper, gold and lithium. Most of the time those objectives point in the same direction, which is why the model has worked so well. The uncomfortable scenario is the one where they diverge: a Chinese resource-security priority that requires paying a price a purely commercial buyer would not, or holding an asset a purely commercial owner would sell.

The Allied Gold termination is instructive here precisely because it cut the other way. The state apparatus, in that instance, appears to have restrained a deal rather than encouraged one. That should update priors in both directions: the state is a real actor in Zijin's capital allocation, and its interventions are not reliably growth-maximising. Minority shareholders are exposed to a decision-maker whose objective function they cannot observe.

Where the scrutiny is — and is not

The critical commentary on Zijin is overwhelmingly reputational rather than financial. NGOs, investigative outlets and human-rights bodies have produced substantial work on the company's environmental record, its labour practices in weakly-regulated host countries, and its political relationships. What is conspicuously thin is the other kind of scrutiny: a detailed, published sell-side or activist critique of the debt-funded pace of acquisitions.

That absence is itself a finding. Western majors of comparable size operate under constant, adversarial analytical pressure — short-seller reports, activist letters, quarterly interrogation on capital discipline. Zijin, listed in Shanghai and Hong Kong, faces far less of it. The company that has done more M&A than almost any miner in the world over the last decade has been subject to less public financial challenge than peers doing far less. Investors should not read the absence of criticism as the absence of problems; they should read it as a thinner market for negative information.

There is no activist campaign at Zijin and, given the shareholder structure, there is unlikely to be one. The closest available stress test is simply the passage of time: does a company with a government-linked blocking shareholder and a newly installed, non-founder management team hold capital discipline, or does growth-at-all-costs acquisition resume without an internal brake?

Which brings us to the things that could actually go wrong.

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IX. Risk Radar

Zijin's risk profile is unusual. Most large miners worry about commodity prices and a handful of permits. Zijin's genuine risks are distributed across a dozen sovereigns, several of which are actively contesting the terms of its presence.

DRC: where the state is a partner, a regulator, and a claimant

In October 2025, the DRC's Court of Auditors published findings from a state audit alleging that mining companies had underreported US$16.8 billion in revenue between 2018 and 2023. Kamoa-Kakula was named alongside Glencore's Kamoto Copper Company, CMOC's Tenke Fungurume, Sicomines, ERG's Metalkol and Ruashi Mining; the named group collectively accounted for around US$10 billion of the alleged shortfall. The audit said the discrepancies deprived local development funds of US$50.4 million and recommended tougher enforcement including suspensions and prosecutions.³⁹ Glencore publicly disputed the findings, arguing the discrepancy reflected different interpretations of when the law took effect; the other named companies, including Ivanhoe, did not comment publicly at the time.³⁹

The follow-through shows how quickly this environment can escalate. In a related tax dispute, Congolese authorities sealed Glencore's offices in the country before unsealing them in July 2026.⁴⁰ Zijin was not the target there — but the point is that the regulatory posture is unpredictable and applies to the industry as a class.

Combine that with the ownership structure at Kamoa-Kakula, where the state already holds 20% and neither commercial partner controls the asset, and you have a situation where Zijin's single most valuable growth asset is one where it cannot unilaterally decide anything and where the host government has both a seat at the table and an active revenue claim.

Serbia: the community risk that will not resolve

Bor is where Zijin's reputational and operational risks are most visibly entangled. The company has faced repeated environmental fines and, in 2021, a forced work stoppage.⁴¹

The sharper episode began in January 2024, when residents of the village of Krivelj blockaded access and halted production at Zijin's newest Serbian mine, protesting dust, blasting damage to homes, and the absence of a resettlement agreement.⁴² The concessions that followed were partial — rerouted truck traffic, some compensation discussions — without a full resettlement plan.

Then it escalated to the international level. On August 8, 2025, UN Special Rapporteurs on minority issues and on toxics and human rights wrote jointly to the Serbian Government and to Serbia Zijin Copper, raising allegations of severe environmental contamination and human rights violations in Krivelj and Slatina, and asking whether social and environmental impact assessments had been carried out, what grievance mechanisms existed, and what steps had been taken to protect the local Vlach minority.⁴³ Recipients had 60 days to respond before the communication was made public. According to the rapporteurs, no response was received from any recipient, and the concerns were published in October 2025.⁴³

For an investor, the failure to respond is the material detail. Whatever the merits of the underlying allegations, choosing not to answer a UN special-procedures communication is a disclosure posture — and it is the kind of posture that raises the cost of capital with European institutional investors and complicates permitting in every future European jurisdiction.

Colombia: an orebody under someone else's control

At Buriticá, Zijin has confirmed that organised groups illegally mined high-grade shallow ore bodies within its concession, while stating that the financial losses were still being assessed and downplaying the impact on production.⁴⁴ Press investigations have alleged a far larger scale — reports of more than 3.2 tonnes of gold, worth roughly US$200 million and equivalent to something approaching 40% of the site's output, stolen in a single year, with illegal miners linked to the Clan del Golfo occupying tens of kilometres of tunnels.⁴⁵

Those figures have not been confirmed by the company at that magnitude and should be treated as contested rather than established.⁴⁶ What is not contested is the structural problem: a high-grade, narrow-vein gold deposit in a region with an entrenched informal mining economy and an armed group willing to enforce access. Zijin has pursued international arbitration against the Colombian state over what it alleges is a failure to provide security guarantees.⁴⁵ That is a multi-year process with an uncertain outcome, and it converts an operating problem into a legal overhang.

The safety and environmental record

There is one event that still shapes how Zijin is perceived, and it happened at home. In July 2010, a leak from the tailings system at the Zijinshan copper mine sent acidic, copper-laden wastewater into the Ting River. More than 1,900 tonnes of fish died, drinking water for roughly 60,000 people was affected, and there was a delay of around nine days between the incident and public confirmation by authorities. Zijin initially attributed the leak to heavy rainfall; police subsequently detained several employees, including a vice president.⁴⁷

Sixteen years on, the relevance is not the fine. It is the disclosure lag. A company that took nine days to confirm a major environmental incident at its flagship domestic asset established a pattern that observers now apply to Serbia, to Colombia, and to the Kakula dispute with Ivanhoe. There have also been fatal accidents at Chinese operations in the years since, including a 2023 fall-from-height incident that killed three at a Fujian project, and earlier incidents at Lhasa and Longyan sites. For a company operating at 5,000 metres and in deep underground mines across a dozen countries, safety performance is not an ESG checkbox — it is a leading indicator of operational control.

Leverage: currently comfortable, structurally cyclical

The balance sheet is the risk most likely to be misread, in both directions.

Total debt rose from roughly RMB 145.5 billion to RMB 152.8 billion between 2023 and 2024 — the arithmetic consequence of running an acquisition programme and a capex programme simultaneously.²⁵ But the leverage ratios improved over the same period: debt to EBITDA fell from about 3.1x to 2.4x, and interest coverage rose from roughly 6.4x to 9.2x.²⁵ EBITDA growth from higher metal prices outran the debt taken on to buy and build.

S&P Global Ratings validated the trajectory on May 26, 2026, revising Zijin's outlook to positive from stable while affirming its BBB long-term issuer credit rating, citing expanded production capacity, stronger cost management, a robust project pipeline and solid execution.²

Now read the same facts pessimistically. The improvement in leverage was driven by the numerator of the ratio — earnings — not by debt reduction. Absolute debt went up. If copper and gold prices normalise toward mid-cycle levels while capex commitments in Tibet, Serbia and the DRC remain contractual, that ratio reverses quickly and mechanically. Nothing about the current leverage position is fragile at today's prices. Nothing about it has been tested at 2015 prices, either — and the management team has never run this balance sheet through a downcycle.

And the risk no strategy can hedge

The Kakula seismic event belongs on this list as its own category. Every other risk here is human: a regulator, a community, a criminal group, a price. That one was the rock itself. It is a reminder that in mining, the terminal risk is not always negotiable.

Which raises the war-game question: given all of this, why does Zijin keep winning?

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X. Competitive Landscape, Porter's Five Forces, and 7 Powers

Set up the board.

In copper, the incumbents are BHP, Freeport-McMoRan, Codelco, Southern Copper and Glencore — all producing at or above Zijin's scale, all constrained. BHP's growth hinges on Escondida grade management and the long-dated Resolution and Vicuña projects. Freeport's is dominated by Grasberg and by leaching innovation at existing US assets. Codelco, the state-owned Chilean giant, has spent the decade and tens of billions converting open pits to underground mines just to hold output flat. Glencore's copper book has been shrinking. The only other genuine share-gainer is another Chinese company, CMOC (洛阳钼业), whose Congolese assets drove a 55% output increase in 2024 and took it into the global top ten.

In gold, Newmont and Barrick sit at the top, followed by Agnico Eagle, which has quietly become the most operationally admired of the group by concentrating in Canada and Finland — the mirror image of Zijin's strategy. Below them, Zijin's Chinese peers Zhaojin Mining and Shandong Gold remain domestically anchored.

So where does Zijin actually rank? Fourth-ish in copper, sixth-ish in gold, first among all miners in growth rate. The question is whether that growth reflects a durable advantage or a temporary willingness to take risks that will eventually be priced.

Porter, applied honestly

Rivalry in mining is unusual because the product is fungible and the price is set globally. Miners do not compete for customers; they compete for assets. That reframes everything. The competitive arena is the M&A market, the permitting queue and the government negotiating table — and those are precisely the arenas where Zijin has outperformed.

Barriers to new supply are the industry's strongest structural feature. Discovery rates for large copper deposits have fallen. Permitting in stable jurisdictions routinely runs a decade or more. Capital intensity per tonne of new copper capacity has risen sharply. This is the tailwind under the entire sector, and it accrues to whoever already holds developable ounces and tonnes.

Buyer power is essentially nil for gold and modest for copper concentrate, where smelter treatment charges have collapsed to historically punishing levels for smelters — a dynamic that favours miners holding concentrate and, incidentally, explains why Zijin has been building its own smelting capacity at Kamoa and Manono.

Supplier power is real and under-discussed: mining equipment, tyres, skilled underground contractors, and increasingly grid power in remote locations. Zijin's battery-electric haul truck fleets at two Chinese mines, which the company says cut per-tonne-kilometre costs by roughly 29% versus diesel, are as much a supplier-power hedge as an emissions story.¹⁹

Substitution is copper's genuine long-term threat — aluminium in transmission, thrifting in motors and wiring — and it caps the price at which demand destruction begins. It is not a near-term concern but it is the reason no one should model copper as infinitely scarce.

The net: the industry structure is favourable, and it is favourable to everyone in it. Structure alone does not explain Zijin.

7 Powers: what Zijin actually has

Hamilton Helmer's framework asks a harder question: what lets a company sustain differential returns that competitors cannot arbitrage away?

Process power — the strongest claim. Zijin's repeated ability to take an asset that a previous owner declared marginal and bring it into production faster and at lower capital cost is the clearest candidate. The evidence is specific: RTB Bor, insolvent for two decades, now anchors a growing copper business. Continental Gold and Guyana Goldfields, both failing, are producing inside Zijin Gold International. Rosebel, sold by a deleveraging IAMGOLD, now sits in a business that grew gold output 44% in a half-year. And Julong Phase 2 — a doubling of throughput at 5,000 metres in about 18 months — is a capability that would be difficult for a Western major to replicate at any price, because it depends on an integrated engineering-construction ecosystem, a workforce accustomed to that pace, and a decision-making culture that does not require a decade of studies. Process power is by definition slow to build and slow to copy. This one is real.

Counter-positioning — real but ethically contestable. Western majors are increasingly constrained from operating in the DRC, Serbia, Colombia or PNG-style jurisdictions by ESG mandates, litigation exposure, and investor pressure. Those constraints do not bind Zijin symmetrically. That is textbook counter-positioning: the incumbents cannot copy the strategy without damaging their existing business. It is also, as an investment thesis, an uncomfortable thing to underwrite — the return is partly compensation for accepting human and environmental costs that others decline to accept. Sitting with that discomfort is more honest than resolving it.

Scale economies — weak. Copper cathode is copper cathode. There is no meaningful demand-side scale benefit. Whatever procurement leverage size confers is available to BHP and Freeport too.

Branding — absent. No customer pays a premium for Zijin metal.

Switching costs, network economies, cornered resource — largely absent, with one partial exception: Julong and Kamoa are, individually, cornered resources in the plain sense that there is only one of each. But Zijin does not own either outright — it holds 39.6% of Kamoa-Kakula, and its Julong ownership required a second RMB 13.7 billion transaction to consolidate.

Where the moat is thin

Three honest weaknesses. Zijin's cost position is good but not dominant; a best-quintile cost curve position gives resilience in a downturn, not immunity. Its acquisition edge depends on continued access to capital and on a risk appetite that is, by definition, a policy choice rather than a structural asset — and one that a new leadership team, or a controlling shareholder, could revise. And its process power is concentrated in construction and turnaround; it has not yet been demonstrated in the harder discipline of walking away from a bad deal.

Which is precisely where the bull and bear cases diverge.

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XI. Bull vs. Bear: Why It Wins From Here, and Why It May Not

The bull case

The bull case starts with a claim about demand that is unusually well-supported: the world needs materially more copper, the supply response is structurally slow, and the deposits that can respond are concentrated in places the incumbents will not go. Gold, separately, has been in a bull market driven by central-bank accumulation and monetary anxiety, and Zijin holds a genuine top-tier position in it.

Against that backdrop, Zijin offers something scarce in large-cap mining: growth backed by commissioned assets rather than promises. The 2028 targets — 1.50–1.60 million tonnes of copper and 130–140 tonnes of gold — rest substantially on Julong Phase 2, which is running; Kamoa's Phase 3 and smelter, which are built; the Serbian complex, which is producing; and Zhunuo, which was slated to start in 2026.¹⁸¹⁹ Most Western majors cannot show you where their next 40% of volume comes from. Zijin can point at it.

The financial evidence has been supportive. Revenue grew 15% in 2025 while profit grew 62%, which is operating leverage doing what operating leverage does at the top of a price cycle.¹ The half-year 2026 pre-announcement of RMB 39.1 billion in net profit, up 68%, extended that.¹⁹ Leverage improved through the peak-capex period rather than deteriorating, and S&P moved the outlook to positive.² Dividends rose alongside the acquisitions rather than being crowded out by them.

And the capital-recycling machine is now proven at least once: Zijin took overseas gold assets that the market was valuing inside a conglomerate discount and listed them at a valuation the parent's own multiple was not delivering.²¹ If that can be repeated — and there is no obvious reason it cannot be, with copper or with the lithium portfolio — Zijin has a structural funding advantage over peers who must issue parent equity or lever up.

Add the lithium option, bought during the worst of the downcycle at prices that make it cheap to hold, and you have a company positioned across all three metals of electrification.

The bear case

Start with the thing that is only eight months old. Zou Laichang and Lin Hongfu have not been tested through a real downcycle or a genuinely contested capital-allocation decision that they themselves controlled. The one large decision of their tenure so far — the US$4 billion Allied Gold acquisition — was terminated by regulatory inaction in Beijing, not resolved by management judgment.²⁹ That is an information vacuum where a track record should be.

Second, the geographic concentration is the strategy and the vulnerability in the same breath. Zijin's growth is concentrated in the DRC, Serbia, Colombia, Papua New Guinea and Tibet. Every one of those has produced, in the last six years, an event that materially affected production or terms: a licence non-renewal in PNG that cost three years and a worse ownership split; a village blockade in Serbia; illegal occupation of tunnels in Colombia; a state audit and revenue dispute in the DRC. These are not tail events in Zijin's portfolio. They are the base rate.

Third, the operational fragility is real, and the May 2025 Kakula suspension proved it at the worst possible asset.

Fourth, the environmental and safety record raises the probability of exactly the community and regulatory conflicts that the expansion strategy requires it to avoid — and the pattern of slow or absent disclosure, from the 2010 Ting River delay to the unanswered UN communication, compounds it.

Fifth, the controlling-shareholder question has no clean answer. A local government holding a blocking stake, plus a national regulator that can veto outbound acquisitions without explanation, means minority shareholders are junior participants in decisions they cannot observe.

Sixth, the balance sheet looks comfortable specifically because metal prices are extraordinary. Absolute debt has risen every year through the expansion. The ratios that look reassuring today are functions of a numerator that is cyclical.

An activist's script

If a skeptical long/short investor were to write the bear memo, the sharpest lines would not be about any of the above. They would be about complexity and accountability. Zijin now runs mines across roughly 17 countries in copper, gold, zinc, silver, molybdenum, tungsten, tin, lithium and potash, with a separately listed gold subsidiary holding many of the overseas assets, a newly consolidated A-share subsidiary in Zangge, and a 39.6% stake in a Congolese joint venture whose technical disclosures it has publicly disagreed about with its own partner. The activist question is simple: can any board actually supervise that? And a follow-up: when a company that promised capital discipline immediately attempts a US$4 billion acquisition through its newly listed subsidiary, is the spin-off a value-unlocking event or an off-balance-sheet growth vehicle?

There is no evidence of impropriety in any of that. But complexity is where accountability goes to hide, and Zijin's complexity is increasing rather than decreasing.

The honest synthesis

Zijin's core advantage and its core vulnerability are the same fact. Going where Western majors will not go is what generated the returns — and it concentrates the company's future precisely in the jurisdictions most exposed to expropriation, community conflict and regulatory reversal. There is no version of this business that keeps the advantage and discards the risk. An investor is not choosing between them; they are buying both.

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XII. Playbook: Business & Investing Lessons

Strip away the geology and there are four transferable lessons here.

Distress is a repeatable strategy, not a one-off. The instinct to buy assets during commodity downturns is universally praised and almost never practised, because the moment to do it is the moment when the market punishes you for doing it. Zijin bought into the DRC when Ivanhoe could not fund it, into Serbia when the state could not sell it, into Colombia and Guyana when the owners were in crisis, and into Argentine lithium as the lithium cycle turned. What made it repeatable was not courage but structure: a domestic cash engine that kept generating, an equity market willing to fund growth, and a technical organisation confident it could re-underwrite someone else's mine plan. Contrarian capital allocation requires all three. Most companies have at most one.

Capital recycling is a funding strategy, not a valuation trick — if you do something with the proceeds. Zijin has now used the public markets three times as a growth mechanism: Hong Kong in 2003 to acquire a hard-currency balance sheet, Shanghai in 2008 to build a domestic equity base, and the Zijin Gold International spin-off in 2025 to create a second, self-funding acquisition platform. The pattern is clear enough to expect a fourth. The lesson for investors is to judge each one by what it enabled, not by the pop on debut. On that test, the 2025 spin-off is currently unproven: it created the vehicle, and the vehicle's first major deployment was blocked.

Succession can be engineered, but only over decades. Zijin's transition was not a search process. It was the endpoint of a thirty-year grooming programme in which both successors joined in the 1990s, ran technical functions in the 2000s, sat on the board or in senior management from 2006, and served an apprenticeship — Zou as President for three years, Lin as chairman of the spin-off — before taking the top jobs.⁴ Contrast that with the founder-led companies that discover, at the moment of the founder's departure, that no internal candidate has ever been allowed to make a consequential decision. Zijin's approach costs decades of deliberate delegation. It is also the only version that reliably works.

And the uncomfortable one. Some of the best risk-adjusted returns in global mining over the past decade came from operating in jurisdictions that carry real human and environmental costs — costs borne by communities in Bor, in Buriticá, and along the Ting River. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is a description of where the excess return came from. An investor can decide that host governments and international bodies are the right venue for adjudicating those costs, or can decide the exposure is not one they want. What is not intellectually available is pretending the return and the cost are unrelated.

The Zijin story is, in the end, a story about the price of saying yes when everyone else is saying no — and about who ends up paying it.

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XIII. Epilogue: What to Watch

Chen Jinghe is 68 and advising a battery company. Zou Laichang is running a business with a target to be a top-three producer of both copper and gold within two years. Kakula is still working its way back. Krivelj is still unresolved. And the largest acquisition Zijin ever attempted collapsed four weeks ago because a regulator in Beijing did not act.

For an investor holding this into the next decade, most of the noise can be ignored. Three things cannot.

One: mined copper and gold volumes against the 2028 targets. This is the single cleanest scoreboard. The company has committed publicly to 1.50–1.60 million tonnes of copper and 130–140 tonnes of gold by 2028, from 1.09 million tonnes and 90 tonnes in 2025, with 1.20 million tonnes and 105 tonnes guided for 2026.¹⁸¹ Volumes are hard to fake, arrive on a predictable schedule, and directly test the claim that Zijin's process advantage survived the founder. Watch the annual and interim production disclosures, and watch particularly whether growth ex-Kamoa keeps compounding — because that is the part management controls.

Two: net debt to EBITDA as metal prices normalise. The leverage story to date has been earnings growth outrunning debt growth. The informative period is the one where prices stop helping. If Zijin holds leverage in the low-to-mid twos through a period of softer copper and gold while continuing to fund Tibet, Serbia and the DRC, that is strong evidence of genuine financial discipline. If the ratio drifts back toward and past three, the market will re-rate the acquisition strategy as leverage rather than skill.

Three: what the Zou-Lin team does with capital when it has a free hand. Not what they say — what they sign. The Allied Gold episode gave a partial read on appetite but none on judgment, because management never got to complete or abandon it on the merits. The next large transaction is the real test. Specifically: do they pay a premium for a marquee asset in a difficult jurisdiction, or do they revert to the founder's pattern of buying from a seller who has no choice? Those two behaviours look similar in a press release and are completely different as investments.

Beyond the three, keep a watch list of live threads. Kakula's return to sustained full production and whether Ivanhoe and Zijin converge on a shared technical narrative. Whether Serbia's Krivelj dispute produces a resettlement agreement or escalates further through international human-rights channels. Whether the Lower Zone at Čukaru Peki gets a properly costed mining-method decision. Whether lithium hits the 120,000-tonne mark it was guided to for 2026, and at what unit cost. And whether the Zijin Gold International vehicle gets used again — because the second attempt will say far more about the model than the first one did.

The company that grew out of a Fujian county bureau is now a genuine peer of BHP and Rio Tinto in market value and a top-four producer of the metal that electrification runs on. It got there by buying what nobody wanted and building faster than anyone expected. The next chapter turns on a narrower question than the last one: whether that was a company, or a man.

Zijin Mining Group Company Limited

Table of Contents

Zijin Mining: China's Copper-and-Gold Colossus Goes Global

I. Introduction & Episode Roadmap

II. Origins: Zijinshan and the Geologist Who Found Gold Under Copper

From county bureau to joint-stock company

Why the old history stays short

III. The Overseas Buying Spree Begins (2010–2018): Buying Distressed and Unloved Assets

The proof-of-concept deals

Serbia: the bargain that defined the playbook

Kamoa: the option that became the company

The pattern — and the test to apply to it

IV. Copper Becomes the Crown Jewel: Julong, Kamoa-Kakula, and the Race to Scale

Why Julong is the more revealing asset

Kamoa-Kakula: the crown jewel and its crack

An underrated governance signal: the partners disagreed in public

Where copper sits in the business

Serbia's second act

The competitive frame

The industry backdrop

V. The Gold Empire and Its 2025 Spin-Off

What went into the box

The scale that resulted

The first evidence on whether the spin-off worked

The strategic logic — and the strategic tell

VI. The New Bet: Lithium and "Two Lakes, Two Mines"

Why a copper-gold company is buying brine

What the numbers say so far

VII. The End of the Chen Jinghe Era: Current Management, Incentives, and Credibility

The man who left

The men who took over

The incentive structure

The credibility question

The capital allocation record they inherited

VIII. Governance and the State Question

Mixed ownership, in practice

Where the scrutiny is — and is not

IX. Risk Radar

DRC: where the state is a partner, a regulator, and a claimant

Serbia: the community risk that will not resolve

Colombia: an orebody under someone else's control

The safety and environmental record

Leverage: currently comfortable, structurally cyclical

And the risk no strategy can hedge

X. Competitive Landscape, Porter's Five Forces, and 7 Powers

Porter, applied honestly

7 Powers: what Zijin actually has

Where the moat is thin

XI. Bull vs. Bear: Why It Wins From Here, and Why It May Not

The bull case

The bear case

An activist's script

The honest synthesis

XII. Playbook: Business & Investing Lessons

XIII. Epilogue: What to Watch

References