Ivanhoe fires up Africa's largest copper smelter at Kamoa-Kakula

Ivanhoe Mines has ignited what it describes as the largest and greenest copper smelter in Africa, marking a milestone the company had been working towards for years even as its Kamoa-Kakula complex in the Democratic Republic of Congo battled the aftermath of seismic flooding.

On 21 November, the Canadian miner officially fired up its 500,000-tonne-per-annum copper smelter at Kamoa-Kakula, accompanied by an opening ceremony attended by the chief of local communities and founder Robert Friedland. "The ceremony today is not just a ritual; it is the passing of a torch representing transformative change at Kamoa-Kakula … From a site where we first discovered high-grade copper in 2008, we now harness a fire blessed by tradition to power a facility that will set a new global standard for copper smelting," Friedland said. Shares traded flat at around C$14.70, valuing the company at roughly C$20.8bn.

From concentrate to anode

Ivanhoe said it expected to feed the first concentrate into the smelter by year-end, kick-starting production of 99.7%-pure blister copper anodes. Once ramped up, the plant would prioritise processing all concentrate produced by Kamoa-Kakula's Phase 1, 2 and 3 concentrators, with any excess trucked to the nearby Lualaba smelter in Kolwezi. The complex held roughly 37,000 tonnes of copper inventory on site ahead of the smelter's start-up.

A long-delayed payoff

The smelter's commissioning had been pushed back repeatedly through the year as Ivanhoe diverted capital and management attention to dewatering the flooded Kakula mine, and its arrival offered a rare piece of unambiguously good news after a difficult 2025. By eliminating the need to truck raw concentrate to third-party smelters, the plant promised to cut transport costs sharply and let Ivanhoe capture more value from every tonne of ore mined — an economic uplift that would matter even more once underground production volumes recovered. First anode production followed just five weeks later, on 29 December, with the facility set to ramp toward its full 500,000-tonne-a-year capacity through 2026, positioning Kamoa-Kakula to sell higher-value blister copper rather than raw concentrate into international markets.

Sources

• Mining.com: Ivanhoe Mines fires up Africa's largest copper smelter, 01 Dec 2025
• Business Insider Africa: Canadian mining firm fires up Africa's largest copper smelter in historic launch, 03 Dec 2025

Photo: A copper smelter in the DRC's Katanga copperbelt region. Gécamines (Zairian company), Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.