Sinomine wins extra 300,000t lithium export quota for Bikita

Sinomine Resource Group has secured a quota to export an additional 300,000 tonnes of lithium concentrate from its Bikita mine in Zimbabwe, the company disclosed in its half-year report.

The Shenzhen-listed group said the new allocation was granted in July, following a first quota of 200,000 tonnes in April, Reuters reported. Sinomine said concentrate supply from Bikita had returned to normal after stoppages between February and April and was now sufficient to feed its smelting operations in China.

How the quota system works

Zimbabwe suspended all concentrate exports in February, citing alleged malpractice and leakages, and replaced the freeze with quotas from April. The allocations are tied to conditions including commitments to domestic processing. The government has said concentrate exports will be banned outright from January 2027.

Business Insider Africa pointed out the apparent contradiction of a country restricting raw lithium exports while handing one company a large additional allocation. The explanation lies in Sinomine's processing commitments: the group is building a 100,000-tonne-a-year lithium sulphate plant at Bikita that it expects to complete in mid-2027.

Bikita's scale

Bikita, in Masvingo province, is among Zimbabwe's biggest lithium operations. Sinomine runs two plants there with combined capacity of 600,000 tonnes a year of spodumene and petalite concentrate. A recent technical upgrade will raise annual spodumene concentrate capacity to 400,000 tonnes, the company said.

Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt runs the country's only operating lithium sulphate plant at Arcadia, from which it made Africa's first lithium salt export in April. Sichuan Yahua is building a sulphate plant at Kamativi. Chinese investors have put roughly $2 billion into Zimbabwe's lithium industry, according to Reuters.

What it means

The quota confirms that Harare is prepared to keep concentrate flowing for companies it judges to be serious about beneficiation. That is pragmatic: a strict cut-off before plants are ready would strand ore and cost the treasury revenue. But the mid-2027 completion date for Bikita's sulphate plant sits beyond the January 2027 ban. Unless Sinomine accelerates construction or the government grants some form of transition, the company faces a gap of several months in which its concentrate has nowhere legal to go.

That gap is exactly what the industry's producers' association asked the government to address in June, when it requested a six-month delay to the ban.

Sources

• MINING.COM (Reuters): Sinomine secures additional Zimbabwe lithium export quota, 25 Aug 2026
• Business Insider Africa: Zimbabwe is restricting raw lithium exports, but a Chinese mining company just got an extra 300,000 tons, 26 Aug 2026

Photo: Specimen of bikitaite, a lithium mineral named after the Bikita area of Zimbabwe. Kaethe17, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.