Zambia's 10% export duty on copper concentrate returned on September 30 after a year-long waiver lapsed with no extension, just as the country's second-largest copper producer restarted a flagship smelter that had been offline for more than three months.
The waiver, introduced in August 2025 to let miners keep shipping concentrate while domestic smelters underwent maintenance or repairs, allowed duty-free exports of up to 271,742 tonnes, according to a government notice reviewed by Reuters and reported by Fastmarkets. Mopani Copper Mines held the largest allocation, at 100,000 tonnes, followed by Barrick's Lumwana mine at 56,986 tonnes and roughly 43,000 tonnes each for First Quantum Minerals and the Chinese-owned Nkana Mining and Minerals Processing. No extension of the waiver had been announced as it lapsed.
The duty's return coincided with Konkola Copper Mines' announcement on September 21 that it had resumed operations at its Nchanga smelter, following a 106-day shutdown that ran 46 days longer than the 60 days originally planned once inspectors found additional corrosion in the plant's acid-production circuit. Nchanga, commissioned in 2010 at a cost of $350 million, has a rated capacity of 311,000 tonnes of copper a year; KCM said the roughly $40 million repair was its first major refurbishment of the smelter in years.
A Bigger Bet on Processing Tailings
Days before the smelter restart, KCM signed a $498 million engineering and construction contract with China Nerin Engineering for a new plant in Chingola designed to leach copper out of decades of accumulated mine tailings, with a planned capacity of about 70,000 tonnes a year. KCM, majority-owned by Vedanta Resources subsidiary CopperTech Metals, produced just 80,215 tonnes of copper in 2025 and is targeting 300,000 tonnes a year by 2030 — part of a national push to triple Zambian output to 3 million tonnes by 2031.
Fastmarkets principal analyst Andy Cole said the restart and the new tailings plant mark progress, but cautioned that the operation still has a long way to go to hit its production targets after years of underinvestment.
A step in the right direction.
Andy Cole, principal analyst, Fastmarkets
A trader who spoke to Fastmarkets said the real constraint at KCM has always been the smelter's own acid supply rather than financing, and expected the tailings project to have little immediate effect on the broader concentrate market.
The return of the export duty mostly bites at the margin: Zambia ships the bulk of its copper as refined cathode, not raw concentrate, so the levy's real test will be whether the country's smelters — Nchanga included — can keep pace with concentrate output as miners like KCM and Barrick ramp up production through the rest of the decade.