Zijin Mining: Copper Growth That Doesn't Wait for a Copper Rally

The record is easy to explain, and that is exactly the trap. Zijin Mining guided to RMB 51-52 billion of net profit for 2025, up roughly 60% and its best year ever. The obvious read is that it was all price: gold ran to record highs and copper touched fresh peaks, and China's biggest miner collected the check. If you file Zijin away as "a leveraged bet on more copper," you are still pricing the old story.

The column that matters is the other one — tonnage. And there the 2025 profit surge tells a quieter, more revealing story.

Mined copper, in thousand tonnes: 580 in 2021, 880 in 2022, 1,010 in 2023, 1,070 in 2024, and essentially flat at 1,090 in 2025. Copper, the metal Zijin's long game is built around, basically marked time last year. The 2025 profit jump was driven more by gold — mined output rose from 2.34 to 2.89 million ounces — plus the metals rally. In other words, the market's comfortable explanation for Zijin is already stale.

The re-acceleration is loaded into 2026, which is what makes the next twelve months the interesting window. On January 23, Zijin commissioned Phase II of its Julong copper mine in Tibet, stacking 200,000 tonnes of daily throughput on top of the existing 150,000. At full design, the project is slated to produce roughly 300,000 tonnes of mined copper a year. The company's copper production target steps from about 1.2 million tonnes in 2026 to 1.5-1.6 million by 2028 — a path management has said puts it among the world's top three copper producers, with the Kamoa-Kakula joint venture in the DRC adding a second high-grade leg.

The first-half numbers suggest the engine is already turning. Revenue rose 15.8% to RMB 194.2 billion, but the line that carries the case is net profit attributable to shareholders, up 68.2% to RMB 39.2 billion. Operating cash flow came close to doubling, to about RMB 55.5 billion, on a 19.6% return on equity. That is a compounding business, not a price trade.

Here is the point that matters for the thesis. Goldman Sachs is forecasting copper to ease down from 2025's record highs this year, and J.P. Morgan's bearish scenarios are lower still. A stock that needs a copper re-rating to make money is vulnerable to exactly that. Zijin's argument is that each marginal tonne of new, low-cost copper — Julong, Kamoa — drops to the bottom line at whatever copper does, as long as it does not collapse. Tonnage can outrun a flat or even slightly falling price. The next twelve months of earnings are contracted in the volume curve, not waiting on the metal.

That is precisely why I want to name the honest catch up front, rather than bury it. This volume is bought with one of the industry's heaviest capital programs, so net free cash flow — the metric I usually want as the hard bridge — stays thin while the mines are being built. The proof point here is not a forward free-cash-flow multiple. It is the tonnage trajectory plus the operating cash flow already doubling, and I would treat the absence of generous net FCF as a real, if temporary, source of uncertainty. Meanwhile the market is still pricing a cyclical state miner; the operating setup is becoming a low-cost volume compounder.

The bear case deserves its fair hearing. Zijin is state-backed, with assets in Tibet and the DRC, so geopolitics and governance sit on top of the balance sheet. And there is a specific break condition: the story unravels if the volume ramp stalls at the same moment copper rolls over. Either leg failing on its own is survivable — the whole design is that the two offset each other. It is the simultaneous miss that breaks it.

So the thing to watch is simple. As the year plays out, check whether Zijin actually delivers the 1.2 million tonnes of mine copper it has targeted for 2026 and whether Julong's Phase II reaches its ~300,000-tonne run-rate. That is the casual two-legged bet, and I can be wrong again — but the setup is that growth no longer has to wait for a perfect copper recovery.