Mercuria partners with Zambia on metals trading venture
Mercuria Energy Group is teaming up with Zambia on a metals trading venture, the latest example of a commodity house partnering with a mineral-rich state to secure access to key resources.
Mercuria will join forces with Zambia’s Industrial Development Corp., it said in a statement on Thursday. The Geneva-based company, which hired Trafigura Group veteran Kostas Bintas to build out a metals trading unit this year, is pushing to increase its exposure to copper.
The joint venture will buy and sell copper domestically and for export, and over time will take responsibility for trading Zambia’s share of copper output from the mines in which a state-controlled firm is a shareholder, according to people familiar with the matter. That could eventually represent more than 250,000 tons of copper a year if various ramp up and mine expansion plans are successful, according to a Bloomberg calculation.
Mercuria will provide the financing, which is likely to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, one of the people said, declining to be named, citing the private nature of the information.
The move is intended to provide greater transparency on the profits made by metal traders for the Zambian government, which has long suspected that too large a share of the gains from its copper have gone to foreign companies. In February, a senior economic adviser to the president told Bloomberg the country wanted to get involved in copper trading, complaining that “a lot of financial engineering, call it creative accounting” was reducing the government’s earnings.
Trading houses are working to tie up access to metals vital to the energy transition. For Mercuria and others, that means heavy investments in African countries such as Zambia, the continent’s No. 2 copper producer.
“You will see us very present in Africa and putting our money where our mouth is in respect of the Copperbelt” region, Bintas said in October.
IDC has a 60.3% stake in ZCCM Investments Holdings Plc, which owns minority interests in major copper projects run by global mining companies including First Quantum Minerals Ltd. and Vedanta Resources Ltd.
The tie-up with Mercuria will help “position Zambia as a key player in international markets,” IDC chief executive officer Cornwell Muleya said in the statement.
