Glencore's $24bn copper plan lifts targets for its African mines

Glencore has unveiled plans for new copper projects worth $14bn in committed spending, rising to $24bn should it proceed with Argentina's El Pachón deposit, with its African operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo set to play a central role in the growth push.

Chief executive Gary Nagle told a capital markets day that Glencore would become the world's largest copper producer by 2035, overtaking Chile's state-owned Codelco. "We have a clear pathway for our copper business to exceed 1Mt of annual production by the end of 2028, with a target to produce about 1.6Mt," he said, with chief financial officer Steve Kalmin calling production at that scale "the promised land."

Africa's role

Glencore produced 247,800 tonnes of copper from its African operations, including its Kamoto Copper Company and Mutanda mines in the DRC, in the year just ended — up 10% year-on-year. The company later confirmed that a land-access deal with Congolese state miner Gécamines would help lift Kamoto's output specifically to around 300,000 tonnes a year, underlining how much of Glencore's near-term global copper growth was expected to come from its Congolese assets rather than new greenfield projects.

Analysts unconvinced by the scale of the ambition

Reaction to the wider plan was mixed. Aside from the $230m reopening of the mothballed Alumbrera mine in Argentina, none of the announced projects had yet received full board approval, leaving analysts to note that much of the growth remained contingent on continued favourable market conditions. Many of the projects on Glencore's books were relatively low-risk brownfield extensions of existing operations — a category that squarely included its DRC assets, where Kamoto and Mutanda already had the infrastructure, workforce and processing capacity in place to expand without the capital intensity of a new mine build. For the DRC, the plan reinforced Glencore's position as one of the country's two dominant copper producers alongside China's CMOC, and set the stage for the land deal and marketing agreements with Gécamines that would follow within weeks. It also underscored how much the fortunes of a Swiss-listed diversified miner now hinged on decisions taken in Kolwezi and Lubumbashi, rather than in its more traditional strongholds in Australia and South America.

Sources

• Miningmx: The copper core, 15 Dec 2025
• Miningmx: Glencore to extend KCC in land deal with Gécamines, 18 Feb 2026

Photo: Glencore's corporate headquarters in Baar, Switzerland. Paradise Chronicle, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.