Copper and Zambia: Understanding the Strategic Context

The world is rebuilding its electrical infrastructure, and copper is the material constraint. Zambia has been producing that metal for more than a century. Understanding how those two facts intersect is the starting point for any serious assessment of Zambian copper.

Why copper has become a strategic material

Copper's usefulness rests on a physical property that no substitute matches at commercial scale and cost: it conducts electricity better than any metal except silver. That single characteristic places it inside almost everything an electrified economy is built from — transmission and distribution networks, transformers, switchgear, motors, wind turbines, solar installations, electric vehicles, and the power and cooling systems that data centres depend on.

For most of the twentieth century, copper demand tracked construction and general industrial activity. What has changed over the past decade is the addition of a second, structurally different demand driver. Electrification of transport, expansion and reinforcement of ageing grids, and the buildout of computing infrastructure all consume copper in quantities that are not merely incremental. The International Energy Agency's Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026 describes copper demand continuing to grow strongly through 2025 on the back of grids, renewables, electric vehicles and permanent-magnet applications, with the agency's Stated Policies Scenario projecting demand growth continuing to 2040.

The strategic reclassification of the metal has followed the demand picture. Copper had never previously appeared on a U.S. critical minerals list — the USGS had explicitly declined to recommend it in earlier reviews on the basis that domestic supply was considered adequate. That changed on 7 November 2025, when the USGS published its Final 2025 List of Critical Minerals and included copper among ten newly added commodities, taking the list to sixty. The reclassification is a useful signal of how governments now read the copper market: not as an ordinary industrial commodity available on demand, but as a potential bottleneck.

The supply side is the harder problem

Demand forecasts, however confident, are only half of the picture. The more consequential analysis concerns whether supply can respond.

The evidence suggests it responds slowly, though the most recent assessment shows the picture improving at the margin. The IEA's Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026, published 16 July 2026, put the projected copper supply deficit at around 25% by 2035 under its central case — narrower than the roughly 30% gap projected in the prior year's edition, as new project pipelines have firmed up. The IEA attributes much of that improvement to Africa, and specifically to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia, which together are projected to add some 650,000 tonnes of supply by 2035 beyond what had previously been assumed. A deficit of 25% remains, on the IEA's own description, a major risk to copper markets, and the underlying causes are structural rather than cyclical: ore grades that have declined over decades, capital costs that have risen faster than metal prices for long stretches, a thin pipeline of major new discoveries, and development timelines that have lengthened rather than compressed.

S&P Global's January 2026 study of the copper sector reached a similar conclusion from a different direction, finding that a new copper mine now takes an average of around 17 years to move from discovery to production, with a substantial share of that time consumed by permitting, environmental review and community consultation rather than by construction. Earlier S&P Global work tracking mine lead times found the average rising steadily — from under 13 years for mines starting up in the late 2000s to almost 18 years for those beginning production between 2020 and 2023.

The practical implication is that copper supply cannot be summoned quickly in response to price. Decisions taken today about exploration and project development affect metal availability in the late 2030s.

Concentration of global supply

Global mine production in 2025 was approximately 23 million tonnes. Chile remained the largest producer at around 5.3 million tonnes, roughly 23% of world output. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has become the second-largest producer, at approximately 3.2 million tonnes in 2025, followed by Peru at around 2.7 million tonnes. Chile, the DRC and Peru together account for close to half of global mine supply.

That concentration matters for reasons beyond arithmetic. A supply base clustered in a small number of jurisdictions is exposed to correlated risk — hydrological stress in the Atacama, regulatory change in one capital, a single major operational failure. Copper prices reached record levels during 2026, reflecting tight market conditions and strong expectations for future demand, against a backdrop of export restrictions from major African producers, a suspension of part of Codelco's El Teniente mine, and thin exchange inventories outside the United States, according to London Metal Exchange price data and contemporaneous market commentary.

Zambia's position in global copper production

Zambia produced 890,346 tonnes of copper in 2025, according to the Ministry of Mines and Minerals Development's 2025 annual production statistics, released in January 2026 — an increase of approximately 8% on the 825,513 tonnes recorded in 2024 under the same Ministry series, and a second consecutive year of growth. It fell short of the government's stated one-million-tonne target for the year.

That places Zambia as Africa's second-largest copper producer and, in the USGS country listing for 2025, seventh in the world. In share terms Zambia supplies just under 4% of global mine production — a smaller figure than its reputation suggests, and a useful corrective to promotional framing. Zambia is a significant producer with a deep industrial history; it is not, on current output, a market-setting one.

The near-term trajectory shows a mixed but broadly stable picture. Ministry figures for the first quarter of 2026 showed output of 208,992 tonnes, down roughly 4% against the same period in 2025, as a decline in small-scale production offset a modest increase at the large mines. By the first half of 2026, however, the Ministry reported cumulative output of 447,182 tonnes, a slight increase on the 445,177 tonnes recorded in the same period of 2025, driven by higher production at Kansanshi, Lumwana, Lubambe, First Quantum's other Zambian operations and Konkola Copper Mines. All figures in this section are drawn from the same Ministry of Mines and Minerals Development production series and are not restated from other sources. Growth in a mining economy is rarely linear, and the honest reading is that Zambia's recent gains have come largely from restoring underperforming assets rather than from new mines reaching production.

A century of production history

Commercial copper production in what is now Zambia began at Kansanshi in 1908. Large-scale development followed in the 1920s and 1930s with the opening of the great Copperbelt mines — Roan Antelope, Nkana, Nchanga, Mufulira — and by 1969 national output had reached a peak in the region of 720,000 to 769,000 tonnes, making the country one of the world's leading producers and, at the time, one of Africa's wealthiest.

What followed is instructive. Nationalisation, beginning with the 1969 Matero Declaration and completed in 1973 under Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines, coincided with a sustained withdrawal of investment. Output declined over the subsequent two and a half decades, reaching roughly 250,000 tonnes by 2000, with direct employment falling from over 60,000 to around 22,000. Re-privatisation from the late 1990s brought renewed capital, and production recovered through the 2000s and 2010s to above 700,000 tonnes.

The lesson embedded in that history is not primarily political. It is that copper mining is capital-hungry and unforgiving of underinvestment: orebodies deepen, infrastructure degrades, and the cost of recovering lost ground is considerably higher than the cost of maintaining momentum.

What copper means to the Zambian economy

Few economies are as exposed to a single commodity. Zambia Statistics Agency data for January 2026 showed traditional exports — overwhelmingly copper — accounting for 74.3% of total export earnings. Intermediate goods, principally copper anodes and electrolytic copper cathodes, made up 84.3% of total exports in the same month.

That dependence cuts in both directions. Copper is the country's principal source of foreign exchange, a substantial contributor to government revenue, and the anchor of formal industrial employment. It is also a transmission channel for external shocks: a copper price correction, a smelter outage or a logistics disruption propagates quickly into the exchange rate and the fiscal position. Diversification is a stated national objective for good reason. In the meantime, the responsible development of copper assets remains the most direct route to the revenue that funds diversification.

Geology: the Copperbelt and the North-Western frontier

Zambia's endowment belongs to the Central African Copperbelt, a metallogenic province extending across the border into the DRC and among the most productive sediment-hosted copper systems on earth. The classic Zambian deposits are stratiform, hosted in the Neoproterozoic Katangan sequence, and were the basis of the Copperbelt Province mining towns — Chingola, Kitwe, Mufulira, Chililabombwe — that still supply a substantial base load of national output.

The more consequential development of the past two decades has been the emergence of North-Western Province. Kansanshi, near Solwezi, returned to production in 2005 and is now among Africa's largest open-pit copper operations. Sentinel, near Kalumbila, achieved commercial production in 2016 and produced approximately 396,000 tonnes in 2025 — a large-tonnage, lower-grade operation of a type that was not previously characteristic of Zambian mining. Lumwana, near Solwezi, is a basement-hosted deposit geologically distinct from the classic Copperbelt stratiform style, and is the subject of a multi-billion-dollar expansion intended to approximately double its output.

North-Western Province therefore represents two things simultaneously: a proven producing district responsible for much of Zambia's recent growth, and a region where the geological models are still being refined. Basement-hosted and structurally controlled systems in the province remain comparatively under-explored relative to the century of work done on the Copperbelt proper.

The supporting ecosystem

A country's attractiveness to mining investment rests less on geology than on whether a discovery can be converted into shipped metal. Zambia's position here is mixed, and stating it plainly is more useful than presenting it favourably.

Power

Copper mining is electricity-intensive, and Zambia's grid is heavily hydro-dependent — installed generation capacity of approximately 3,986 MW as at mid-2025, of which roughly 85% is hydropower. That dependence was tested severely by the 2023–24 El Niño drought, when Lake Kariba storage fell to a fraction of normal levels, load shedding extended to as much as 21 hours per day in parts of the country, and mining companies were asked to curtail consumption substantially.

The policy response has been meaningful. The move to an open-access transmission regime ended the single-buyer model, allowing independent power producers and traders to sell directly to large consumers and to import through the Southern African Power Pool. The Ministry of Energy has reported a substantial pipeline of generation projects under construction, and in June 2026 ZESCO stated that it did not expect a return to nationwide load management. Whether the system is genuinely drought-resilient, as opposed to currently well-supplied, is a question that will only be answered by the next poor rainfall season.

Transport and logistics

Zambia is landlocked, and every tonne of copper it exports travels a long way. The eastern route via the TAZARA railway runs approximately 1,860 km to Dar es Salaam; southern road and rail routes to South African ports exceed 2,400 km. The western alternative — the Lobito Corridor, built on the rehabilitated Benguela Railway to Angola's Atlantic coast — is materially shorter and already operating on its Angolan section, with copper moving on the route during 2026.

The Zambian extension itself remains under development, with route alignment, financing, engineering and construction arrangements continuing to progress under the wider Lobito Economic Corridor programme, as reported by the African Development Bank Group and Africa Finance Corporation. This remains one of the faster-moving files in Zambian infrastructure and should be checked against the latest AfDB, AFC and Ministry of Mines statements before any figure here is treated as final.

Skills and supporting services

A hundred years of continuous mining has left Zambia with something that cannot be imported quickly: a workforce, a contracting sector, assay and analytical capability, engineering firms, and regulatory and technical institutions with genuine sector experience. For a new project, this reduces both cost and execution risk relative to genuinely frontier jurisdictions.

What has to go right

Zambia's government has set a target of three million tonnes of annual copper production by 2031 — an increase of well over threefold on 2025 output. Whatever view one takes of that figure's realism, the constraints it would have to overcome are well understood and largely agreed upon across industry and government:

Reliable, competitively priced power at scale. Export logistics that are shorter, cheaper and less exposed to single-route failure. Domestic smelting and refining capacity sufficient to process concentrate rather than export it — an issue underlined by the extended suspension of the 10% concentrate export duty during smelter maintenance. A predictable regulatory and fiscal environment, following the substantial legislative reset represented by the Minerals Regulation Commission Act of 2024 and the Geological and Minerals Development Act of 2025. And a much better geological database: Zambia is undertaking a countrywide high-resolution aerial geophysical survey intended to substantially improve national geological information ahead of the next phase of exploration investment. None of these is trivial. All of them are the sort of problem that yields to sustained, unglamorous work rather than to announcements.

A note on where companies like ours sit

Jimbe Minerals Limited is a copper project development company, advancing copper interests in Zambia — including in North-Western Province — from the exploration stage toward development. We take the view that the country's next phase of copper growth will depend as much on the disciplined advancement of earlier-stage projects as on brownfield expansion at existing mines — and that the standard of technical and environmental work applied at the exploration stage is what determines whether a project is capable of being financed at all. The following articles in this series set out what that pathway involves, and what it means for Zambia's copper industry as a whole.

Sector-level figures in this commentary are drawn from the sources listed above and are not Jimbe Minerals' own data. Market prices and infrastructure timelines were current as of early August 2026 and are subject to change. This commentary reflects the company's perspective and is not investment advice or an offer of securities. Project-specific technical information remains subject to ongoing exploration, evaluation and independent verification.