Zambia's Copper Industry: From Established Producer to Global Growth Opportunity

Zambia is not a frontier copper jurisdiction. It is a century-old producer with an ambitious growth target, a changing ownership structure, and constraints that are well understood by everyone operating in it.

Zambia produced 890,346 tonnes of copper in 2025, according to the Ministry of Mines and Minerals Development, making it Africa's second-largest producer and the world's seventh, at just under 4% of global mine supply. Copper mining and quarrying together with copper exports underpin the formal economy: copper-related exports have consistently accounted for the large majority of Zambia's total export earnings.

Understanding where that industry sits today, who operates within it, and what the government's growth ambitions imply is a different exercise from assessing any single project's geology — and it is the context every serious copper investor in Zambia has to hold in view.

A century of production, not a recent discovery

Commercial copper production in Zambia dates to 1908, and large-scale mining developed through the 1920s and 1930s around the Copperbelt towns of Chingola, Kitwe, Mufulira and Chililabombwe. National output peaked around 1969, declined for two and a half decades following nationalisation, and recovered from the late 1990s as mines were re-privatised and recapitalised.

That history matters to a prospective investor for a practical reason: it has left Zambia with drilling contractors, assay laboratories, metallurgical expertise, smelters, concentrators, roads, rail and a regulatory apparatus that a genuinely frontier jurisdiction would not have. A new project in Zambia is joining an industry, not creating one from nothing.

Who operates the industry today

Zambia's large-scale production is concentrated among a handful of operators, several of which have changed hands or ownership structure in recent years. First Quantum Minerals operates Kansanshi, near Solwezi, and Sentinel, near Kalumbila — between them among the largest copper operations in the country. Barrick Mining Corporation operates Lumwana, a basement-hosted deposit that is the subject of a multi-billion-dollar expansion.

Konkola Copper Mines, on the traditional Copperbelt around Chingola, is majority-owned by Vedanta Resources (80%), with the Zambian government's stake held through ZCCM Investments Holdings (ZCCM-IH). Vedanta's control of KCM was reinstated in 2025 following a protracted dispute with the Zambian government, and the operation remains a focus of rehabilitation investment, including the Konkola Deep Mining Project. Mopani Copper Mines, covering operations around Kitwe and Mufulira, is 51%-owned by International Resources Holding (IRH), with ZCCM-IH holding the remaining 49% — a structure put in place in 2024 after decades of ZCCM-IH sole ownership, and one credited with driving a recent operational recovery at the asset.

ZCCM-IH itself — a state investment vehicle rather than an operator — holds minority stakes across most of this landscape and has signalled an intent to expand its participation on commercial terms. Reading the ownership structure of Zambia's copper industry is now, in effect, reading a live and evolving negotiation between international capital and the Zambian state, and it is worth checking current wherever a specific transaction or shareholding is material to a decision.

The government's growth target

The Zambian government has set a target of three million tonnes of annual copper production by 2031 — roughly three and a half times 2025 output — with an intermediate ambition of reaching around one million tonnes in 2026. Whatever view one takes of the target's ultimate realism, it has driven a substantial legislative and institutional reset: the Minerals Regulation Commission Act of 2024 and the Geological and Minerals Development Act of 2025 together represent the most significant overhaul of Zambia's mining regulatory architecture in a generation.

Alongside the legislative reset, the government has moved to an open-access electricity transmission regime — ending the single-buyer model and allowing large consumers to contract directly with independent power producers or import through the Southern African Power Pool — a direct policy response to the disruption caused by the 2023–24 drought at Lake Kariba. Investment in national geological data is also underway, through a countrywide high-resolution aerial geophysical survey intended to improve the quality of information available to explorers.

Export logistics: a genuine constraint

Zambia is landlocked, and every tonne of copper it exports travels a long way to port — via the TAZARA railway to Dar es Salaam, or via road and rail south to South African ports. The western alternative, the Lobito Corridor, built on the rehabilitated Benguela Railway to Angola's Atlantic coast, is materially shorter and is already carrying copper on its Angolan section.

The Zambian extension of that corridor remains under development, with 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. Until it is complete, logistics remain one of the clearest constraints on how quickly new Zambian production can reach export markets, and figures on timing should be checked against current AfDB, AFC and Ministry of Mines statements rather than treated as fixed.

Where the growth opportunity actually sits

A threefold increase in national output cannot come from brownfield expansion at existing mines alone; the incumbents' own expansion plans, real as they are, do not close that gap on their own. Reaching the government's stated ambition requires new production, and new production requires new discoveries advanced by a broader base of companies than the handful of majority-international operators that currently dominate output.

That is where the industry's structure creates room for smaller, earlier-stage and Zambian-based participants — particularly in North-Western Province, where the classic Copperbelt stratiform model gives way to basement-hosted and structurally controlled systems that remain comparatively under-explored relative to the century of work done on the Copperbelt proper.

Jimbe's position within that structure

Jimbe Minerals Limited is a copper project development company advancing copper interests in Zambia, including in North-Western Province. We are not positioned to compete with the incumbent operators on scale, and do not claim to be. Our view is narrower and, we think, more testable: that the country's stated growth ambition depends on a wider base of technically disciplined project developers bringing new ground through the same evidence-led sequence that any credible copper project has to follow, regardless of who owns it.

Sector-level figures and ownership details in this commentary are drawn from the sources listed above and are not Jimbe Minerals' own data; ownership structures in Zambia's copper sector continue to change and should be checked against current company and regulatory disclosures. This commentary is not investment advice or an offer of securities.