China's Baowu takes majority control of Simandou's northern mining blocks

China Baowu Steel Group, the world's largest steelmaker, completed a transaction on 30 January 2026 raising its stake in Winning Consortium Simandou, operator of the northern half of Guinea's giant Simandou iron ore project, from 49% to 51%. The deal, approved by Guinea's government in May 2024 but only formally completed some twenty months later, gives Baowu majority control of the renamed Baowu Winning Consortium Simandou, which in turn owns 85% of the Guinean operating company responsible for mining Blocks 1 and 2.

Timed with first exports

The stake increase landed just weeks after Simandou's first iron ore left Guinea, with a vessel carrying close to 200,000 tonnes departing the newly built port of Morebaya in December 2025 and docking at Majishan in China's Zhejiang province on 17 January 2026 after a 46-day voyage. The roughly $20-23bn project, built jointly by Rio Tinto's Simfer venture on Blocks 3 and 4 and the Baowu-led consortium on Blocks 1 and 2, is targeting an eventual capacity of about 120 million tonnes of iron ore a year, with an intermediate target near 60 million tonnes during initial ramp-up.

How Simandou was financed

Much of the northern blocks' development was underpinned by Chinese state financing, including a CNY10bn (about $1.45bn) bond Baowu issued on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in early 2024, with at least 70% of proceeds earmarked for the Guinea project, alongside extensive offtake-linked lending common to Chinese-backed African resource projects.

Why control matters

Simandou is widely seen as one of the few developments capable of meaningfully diversifying the world's seaborne iron ore supply away from Australia and Brazil over the next decade, making the balance of ownership and control within it a matter of strategic interest well beyond Guinea. Baowu's move to majority ownership, formalised just as ore began flowing, strengthens Beijing's influence over a project that Chinese steelmakers view as critical to securing long-term, lower-cost iron ore supply outside producers they do not control.

Rio Tinto, which operates the separate southern blocks through its Simfer joint venture, has continued to pursue its own development timeline independently of Baowu's ownership changes, meaning the two halves of Simandou effectively operate as parallel projects under different degrees of Chinese and Western influence within a single, shared piece of Guinean geology.

Sources

• Mining.com: China's Baowu takes control of Simandou iron ore operator, 30 Jan 2026
• Ecofin Agency: Guinea ships first Simandou iron ore, ending decades of delays, 19 Jan 2026
• Hogan Lovells: Hogan Lovells advises China Baowu on its acquisition of an additional 2% stake in mining blocks 1 and 2 of the Simandou Project, 30 Jan 2026