ISSUE #011 · WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 09, 2026
Copper punched through its January high this week with LME three-month hitting a record $14,728/t yesterday as tightening availability outside the US and lingering tariff uncertainty kept speculative money flowing into the market. By Friday, copper had already logged a tenth straight weekly gain, while SHFE inventories had fallen 13% WoW to their lowest since January 2024 at just 63,000t.
The distortion remains visible in the US. July imports topped 220,000t for the first time, including a record 53,290t from the DRC, as buyers increasingly turned to non-COMEX-approved cathode priced off the cheaper LME market. COMEX inventories nevertheless rose, but only modestly over the week, up around 4.4kt to 696,060t, while LME stocks also edged higher by about 4.2kt. Meanwhile, China provided some counterweight with August imports of unwrought copper and copper products falling to their weakest August in six years at 381,900t, while January-August imports were down 6.7% YoY.
In short, copper enters this week with a now-familiar setup: record prices and signs of physical tightness on one side, increasingly obvious price resistance on the other.
But this week’s feature looks beyond the immediate tug-of-war. Because while traders argue over where today’s supply goes, the longer-term market still depends on new supply being financed and built — much of it in places gaining greater leverage over the terms.
What happens when copper scarcity meets sovereign leverage?
01 THE SETUP
This week, the Democratic Republic of Congo moved to take control of the geological data that determines where exploration capital goes, with Kinshasa accelerating airborne surveys and moving mapping and archive digitisation into a single national databank, which is due to be operational by the end of 2026.
Access to data will be tiered. Access to more “sensitive” datasets to be weighed against the state’s “strategic interests,” with the survey’s director general describing the data as a strategic asset of the Congolese state. Officials and industry sources say the policy could end up mattering more than the interventions that reshaped the cobalt market.
This is just the latest in an ongoing series of stories where Congo is exercising greater leverage over its mineral assets. Other recent measures pointing the same direction include:
Law. A bill submitted by lawmaker Serge Chembo N’Konde entered into review in June could amend more than 40 articles of the 2018 mining code that would expand state control, introduce new regulatory agencies, and broaden powers to suspend or withdraw permits. The Chamber of Mines called an emergency forum over the pace of consultation.
Physical flow. A June 29 order banned exports of copper and cobalt concentrates outright, forcing domestic processing. Waivers of up to a year sit at the mines minister’s discretion.
Price. Congo banned cobalt exports in February 2025 at a decade-low price near $10/lb, replaced the ban with quotas, then in June 2026 withdrew unused quotas into a state-controlled strategic pool. Cobalt now trades near $26/lb and the market has moved from surplus to deficit.
Individually these do different jobs. Collectively they raise the same questions.
If the world increasingly needs what sits under Congolese soil, how much of that value can Congo keep? And if Congo starts raising the price of access, does the copper still get built on the timelines the market is counting on?
02 WHY IT MATTERS
A large share of the copper expected to relieve the next decade’s shortage assumes somebody keeps funding Congolese projects. Both major long-run forecasts embed Congo explicitly:
IEA’s Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026 narrowed the projected 2035 copper deficit from around 30% to 25%. The improvement came almost entirely from Africa: the DRC and Zambia together added close to 650,000 tonnes to the 2035 outlook.
S&P Global’s Copper in the Age of AI puts the 2040 gap at 10 million tonnes, roughly 25% below demand. Without new development, primary mined supply peaks at 27 Mt in 2030 and falls to 22 Mt by 2040, with S&P naming the DRC as a potentially substantial contributor to future supply.
So Congo copper is not marginal to future supply arithmetic. Indeed, it’s already an important contributor — its output has gone from roughly 1 Mt in 2015 to 3.4 Mt of exports in 2025 — around 14% of the 23.2 Mt world total. Global mine output rose about 3 Mt across the same decade, which makes Congo a significant source of net growth in the last decade.
03 THE DECODE
Congo’s cobalt export restrictions provide one of the clearest points of evidence that it’s not just willing, but also able to use resource ownership as market leverage. Cobalt prices rose roughly 160% following Congo’s restrictions. And the same IEA Outlook that narrowed the copper gap on the strength of Congolese projects also widened the cobalt gap from just over 15% to over 25%, attributing the revision to Congo’s export quotas.
Of course, the obvious technicality here is that copper is not cobalt. Congo produces most of the world’s cobalt, but only about 14% of its copper. So it cannot set copper prices the way it set cobalt prices.
What it can set, however, is the price of access to its own share of future copper.
Instruments are already embedded in the statute
While the ongoing review of the 2018 mining code is yet to be settled, the 2018 code already taxes copper at a 3.5% royalty on gross value while taxing designated “strategic” minerals at 10%. It also gives the state a 10% non-dilutable free carry, with a further 5% on each renewal of a mining right. And it imposes a 50% tax on super profits, triggered when realised prices run 25% above the levels assumed in a project’s bankable feasibility study.
The super-profits tax is price-indexed, so it converts a rally into government take automatically, without anyone having to legislate. However, the strategic-minerals designation operates as a switch rather than a negotiation — Cobalt’s royalty went from 2% to 10% by administrative designation, and the Chembo bill expands state control over exactly that category.
Copper is not currently designated. But the gap between 3.5% and 10% of gross revenue, levied whether or not a mine is profitable, is the largest discrete fiscal exposure in Congolese copper.
Kamoa-Kakula shows how the terms can also move
Initially, the state took a 5% non-dilutable interest in Kamoa-Kakula in September 2012 under the old code. A further 15% transferred under a November 2016 agreement, taking Kinshasa to a direct 20%, with agreement “highlights” — per Ivanhoe — including “The DRC government [reaffirming] Kamoa Copper’s mineral tenements and [guaranteeing] that the Kamoa-Kakula Copper Project will not be subject to any taxes or duties other than those legally required by the applicable statutory and regulatory provisions for the life of the project.”
First copper came in May 2021, while the state’s stake quadrupled between discovery and production.
Western Forelands might be the perfect live case study
Coincidentally, at almost the same time the DRC geological-data story dropped, Ivanhoe raised contained copper in the Makoko District by 30%, to about 12 Mt on a 100% basis. Importantly, the company calls it the “world’s largest and highest-grade copper discovery of the past decade,” and now plans for “scoping study work to commence soon, which will include mining some of the highest-grade, open pit copper mines in the world.”
The obvious question this raises is whether exceptional geology will tempt Congo to increase its take and, if it does, can it continue doing so without materially affecting investment?
Higher access costs might change who writes the cheque
The real question might not be whether tighter terms eventually stop projects from being built. The evidence so far suggests it might change who builds them instead.
Three of Congo’s four largest copper producers are wholly Chinese-owned; the fourth is a Zijin joint venture. By contrast, the flagship Western deal under the US-DRC minerals partnership, Virtus Minerals’ purchase of Chemaf, involved $30m of equity against roughly $900m of assumed debt for a stalled asset. Where Western capital shows up at scale, it is sovereign rather than commercial: the DFC’s $553m loan to the Lobito railway exists explicitly to keep China from monopolising transit, not because private lenders wanted the exposure.
Curiously, this could erode the disciplining function of capital markets. The standard model assumes price-sensitive commercial bidders. When Washington and Beijing are both bidding for access on strategic grounds, and Western governments will absorb infrastructure risk private lenders decline, the point at which capital walks away sits far higher than a simple discounted cash flow model implies. So Congo might plausibly be able to take more before anything visibly stops being built.
Policy conflicts may limit how much leverage it exercises
If Congo wishes to exercise increasing leverage over mineral resources, Kinshasa faces a balancing act. Its stated aim is to reduce dependence on China. However, the investor most tolerant of shifting fiscal regimes, infrastructure-for-minerals structures and long paybacks might just be Chinese state-linked capital.
Thus, raising the price of access may select for the investor Congo says it wants less of. President Tshisekedi’s July warning to revenue agencies against seizures and closures that threaten investor confidence suggests the government sees the bind.
tl;dr
A growing share of the copper expected to soften the next decade’s shortage sits in the DRC. Those forecasts necessarily assume projects can attract capital. But with Congo exercising increasing leverage over its geology and mineral wealth, capital may become more expensive, arrive later, or come from different sources.
None of this is to say Congo will scare capital away from its best copper. However, it does appear to be willing to attempt making investors pay more for the privilege, slow the marginal projects, and to increasingly determine what kind of capital gets access.
That might have knock-on effects. While copper forecasts built under one set of assumptions might remain directionally correct — “this copper gets developed” — they may still be materially wrong on when, at what incentive price, and under whose control.
04 WHAT TO WATCH
Now → end-2026. DRC’s databank goes live, along with the fee schedule and the access criteria. That document tells you whether this is a revenue mechanism or a screening mechanism. Watch simultaneously whether the Chembo bill (2018 mining code reforms) clears committee, and whether the strategic-minerals list is touched.
Q1 2027. The Makoko scoping study. Read it for capex per tonne of annual capacity, the copper price assumption, assumed state participation, and whether Ivanhoe signals a partner — the identity and nationality of whoever funds Western Forelands may serve as a test of the different-capital thesis.
2027–2029. Congo’s own output is forecast to plateau and then decline from 2029 as high-grade zones in existing mines deplete. That is the hinge date at which the DRC’s contribution stops being “existing mines recover” and starts requiring genuinely new projects to reach FID.
Ongoing. Cobalt may serve as a further tell. ARECOMS quota administration may demonstrate how hard Kinshasa will push. If the deficit holds into 2027 without visible investment flight, copper measures may get bolder.
Chile recorded 34 attacks on copper trains in the first four months of 2026, with 169 tonnes stolen — already 71% of 2025’s full-year total. Reuters reports increasingly organised gangs are boarding moving trains and stripping copper slabs before the cargo reaches port.
Twenty-three projects selected under the EU’s critical-minerals push have warned about liquidity, financing and permitting constraints, with some already stalled. Another reminder that putting a project on a strategic list is the easy part; funding and building it is harder.
“Chinese copper demand” may be an increasingly uselessly broad category — refined copper rod utilisation fell sharply in August, while higher-value applications tied to computing, storage, transformers and electronics remain much firmer.
That’s the wire for today. Until next time, don’t forget to price the landlord.
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