On the first day of the new year, Zijin Mining issued a production forecast. The company's mineral copper output reached 1.01 million tons in 2023, achieving a historic breakthrough. It is an enterprise that breaks the million mark for mineral copper in China, which is equivalent to 54% of China's mineral copper output of 1.87 million tons in 2022. In addition, the annual output of the company's main mineral gold reached 67 tons and mineral zinc reached 467000 tons, up 20% and 3% respectively.

With this as a sign, China's non-ferrous metal mining industry, which has long lagged behind the world's mining giants in terms of benefit scale, output and resources, and global operations, has taken a milestone step.

Ten years of production tripled, globalization strategy spawned value fission

The non-renewable nature of mineral resources determines that mining enterprises have a natural global attribute.

2013 is the first year of Zijin Mining's full implementation of internationalization strategy.

At that time, Zijin Mining's copper output was only about 120000 tons. Faced with the tight external environment of insufficient market confidence in the mining industry, periodic pressure on mineral product prices, and even a cliff-like decline, Zijin Mining maintained its strategic stability, withstood the operating pressure, took the lead in the crisis, and continued to implement precise counter-cyclical mergers and acquisitions, we have successively acquired a number of copper mining projects at a low cost, such as the Kamoa copper mine in Congo (DRC), the Julong copper mine in Tibet, the Bor copper mine in Serbia, and the Peggy copper and gold mine in Serbia. The amount of copper resources has exceeded 75 million tons, ranking 8th in the world, equivalent to more than half of China's total.

With the blessing of these projects, Zijin Mining rapidly promoted project construction and technological transformation, and copper production exploded rapidly, ranking quickly catching up:

Breakthrough 200000 tons in 2017, 300000 tons in 2019, 400000 tons in 2020 and 500000 tons in 2021, and 900000 tons in 2022, benefiting from the stable production and capacity improvement of copper mines. In 2023, growth inertia continued, with production continuing to lead by double-digit growth to the megaton level, advancing into the world's top five.

Affected by multiple factors such as geopolitics, inflationary pressures, and community conflicts, in the past few years, most of the global head mining companies' mineral copper production has declined year-on-year, and copper production growth has been weak. Zijin Mining is one of the few companies in the world that has continued to grow copper production capacity. It is also a large copper mining company with the fastest growth in the world in recent years.

From a trajectory point of view, Zijin Mining's globalization strategy has been implemented for ten years, and the compound growth rate of mineral copper has reached 23%, which has become a solid force supporting the explosive growth of the company's performance. Assets, revenue, and market value have continuously exceeded 100 billion yuan and 0.2 billion yuan., 0.3 billion yuan mark.

"We should look at the mainstream when looking at the problem. Although going global faces some risks and challenges, if mining companies cannot continue to enrich the'granary, 'they will eventually die out as resources are exhausted. Therefore, for Zijin Mining, which is interested in becoming a century-old enterprise, globalization is a multiple-choice question with only one option. Looking back, at present, the resource volume, output and profit contribution of our overseas business have exceeded that of our domestic business. If we stopped for fear of some risks at that time, we were likely to lose a large number of development opportunities." Chen Jinghe, chairman of Zijin Mining, said.

At the same time, Zijin Mining is still accelerating the technological transformation of key production capacity: Kamoa Copper Mine will build a scale of more than 800,000 tons of mineral copper, becoming the world's second largest copper mine; After the completion of the second and third phase technological transformation of Julong Copper Mine, an annual output of 600000 tons of copper will be completed. Serbia's two major projects are planning to produce 500000 tons of copper per year and are expected to be promoted to a major European copper enterprise.

Domestic production exceeds 40%, Tibet's industrial base accelerates its rise

Copper is playing an increasingly important role in the high-quality evolution of human civilization. In the green power revolution, copper is an ideal energy transmission metal.

As the world's largest copper consumption market, China accounts for 59% of the world's consumption, but 73% needs to be imported from overseas, and the market prospect is broad.

Centering on the coordinated development of domestic and international markets and two kinds of resources, Zijin Mining, while strengthening the strategic direction of globalization, has increased the layout of resources investment in domestic and neighboring countries, and enhanced the anti-risk ability of industrial layout.

After investment layout and rapid development in recent years, Zijin Mining's domestic mineral copper output has gradually rebounded. In one million tons of copper output, the domestic proportion has exceeded 40%.

Julong Copper Mine in Tibet

Among them, Tibet's Julong Copper Mine plays the role of ballast stone -115000 tons of mineral copper in 2022 and 152000 tons of copper in 2023. At the same time, the implementation of the second phase of the project is expected to form an overall annual production capacity of 350000 tons of mineral copper.

Chen Jinghe said that Tibet has abundant copper and lithium reserves and is a potential area for domestic copper mine development. Zijin Mining is comprehensively increasing investment in this area. In the future, Tibet will become the company's larger industrial base in China.

In addition to Julong Copper Mine, in August 2023, the company acquired a new Juno Copper Mine in Tibet, adding 1.72 million tons of equity copper resources, and will form another 100000 tons of copper mine with an annual production capacity in the future.

The reconstruction and expansion project of Yulong copper mine in Tibet, the second largest single copper mine in China with Zijin as the second shareholder, will be completed and put into operation in November 2023, and the output of mineral copper will be increased to 150000 tons.

In addition, the company's Heilongjiang Duobaoshan Copper Industry has an annual output of more than 100000 tons of copper, and is accelerating the copper mountain copper mine collapse method mining project, and strive to be completed and put into operation in July 2024.

Full process autonomy to build global core competitive advantage

Resources are born in technology. What is a resource, what is not a resource, and how much value a resource can generate all depend on what kind of technology you have.

"Why are we able to achieve better results when we go out? The main reason is that we have stronger innovation and technological capabilities. As far as global mineral resources are concerned, excellent resources are controlled by Western multinationals, and if we are not better than them, we cannot surpass them." Chen Jinghe pointed out.

In the process of Zijin's globalization, five of them were loss-making projects originally operated by Western companies, but they all turned losses into profits in a short period of time after Zijin took over, initially showing the global competitiveness of Zijin Mining's operation and management.

For example, due to management and technical problems, the century-old mine in Bor Copper Mine in Serbia is on the verge of bankruptcy. After Zijin took over, it quickly focused on the main production industry, focused on long-term development, quickly solved the problem of card neck restricting the improvement of production capacity in various links, vigorously promoted technological transformation, and successfully turned around losses in only half a year. At the same time, according to the design and planning of Western companies, it will take at least five years for the Serbian Peggy copper and gold mine project to be put into production. However, Zijin Mining took less than two years from acquisition, construction to production, which greatly reduced the time cost.

"From prospecting, mining, mineral processing, smelting, environmental protection, the whole set of technology can be led by themselves, we call it the 'ore flow five rings to one' mining engineering management model, which is a systematic thinking and full process autonomy, so our speed is very fast. Many multinational mining companies in the West, in addition to prospecting, other aspects are relying on third-party consulting companies to do technology." Chen Jinghe said.

It is worth noting that Zijin Mining's main mines for this round of explosive growth in copper production: Kamoa Copper Mine, Peggy Copper and Gold Mine, and Julong Copper Mine are all completed and put into operation beyond expectations against the background of the continuous impact of the new crown epidemic, reflecting that Zijin has initially formed a distinctive global development of corporate governance capabilities, which is undoubtedly different from the new governance model of traditional mining giants.

Chen Jinghe said that mining development activities are essentially a "platform", and our original intention of development is to let more people benefit from Zijin's development through the development of mining. The company already has more than 75 million tons of copper, 3100 tons of gold, 11 million tons of zinc and more than 15 million tons of equivalent lithium carbonate, and has the highest actual production capacity of copper, gold and zinc in the domestic and the world's top 10 and the potential global top lithium production capacity. We are quickening the transformation of mineral resources advantages into economic and social benefits advantages, and building a high-level ESG system according to international advanced standards. We plan to enter the world's top 3-5 by 2030 in major economic indicators, to contribute to the good life of mankind green low carbon non-ferrous metal mineral raw materials.