China’s mining expansion
Last year China’s companies ploughed roughly $16bn into mines overseas, not including minority investments.
That is the highest figure in a decade, up from less than $5bn the year before (see top chart). On October 8th a Chinese state-owned enterprise disclosed plans to invest more than $5bn in a copper mine in Afghanistan. The next day Zijin Mining, China’s most valuable listed miner, said it would spend $1bn on a gold mine in Ghana. On October 14th a group of Chinese firms committed $5bn to Zambian mining over the next five years. Chinalco, another Chinese state-owned company, reportedly wants a stake in the Philippines’ biggest copper mine. Chinese miners control a large and growing share of the world’s minerals, including about half of nickel and mined lithium, more than two-fifths of cobalt and a fifth of copper. … The latest spending spree by Chinese miners has tightened their grip on global minerals. Their focus has been to expand their share of copper, a critical element for electrification. In 2023 the metal accounted for around three-fifths of their overseas investment. … All that investment has lifted a number of China’s miners into the big leagues. Zijin, which has assets from Serbia to Suriname, last year produced about three-fifths as much copper as BHP, the world’s most valuable miner, and has ambitions to become a top lithium producer, too. Its market value has soared by 500% over the past five years, to more than $60bn, surpassing Vale, a Brazilian mining giant. CMOC, a Chinese state-backed miner that has been acquiring large cobalt projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is now the world’s biggest producer of the metal.
Source: The Economist