Originally published on LinkedIn on 8 October 2026. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.
In 2019, the world’s largest cobalt mine went quiet. Not because the ore ran out. The price did.
Mutanda had produced 27,300 t of cobalt in 2018, about a fifth of global supply, alongside 199,000 t of copper. Then cobalt fell from highs near US$40/lb to about US$12/lb. Glencore put the mine on care and maintenance. It was, the company said, “no longer economically viable.”
Copper had been worked and traded across Katanga centuries before industrial mining. The Basanga are among the earliest documented copper-working people of the wider region. Their paramount chief, Mpande, controlled access to mining places and received payments from those who worked them. Copper production in the Copperbelt dates to roughly the fourth century CE, more than 1,400 years before 1906.
Later, Luba and Lunda systems moved copper through Central Africa. Then came industrial mining. Union Minière du Haut-Katanga was formed in 1906, transforming the scale of extraction and building a colonial labour system around the same mineral wealth.
Gecamines S.A. held the Mutanda mining titles and geological records when MUMI was created in 2001. Plant construction began in 2009 and mining in 2011. Glencore entered the ownership chain in 2007 and reached 100% in 2017. After the 2022 permit renewals, the DRC State received a 5% interest in MUMI.
Mutanda and Kamoto Copper Company received the Copper Mark in 2025, becoming two of only five copper-mining operations in south-central Africa now holding the Mark, all of them in the DRC.
Then the economics changed again.
Stockpile processing at Mutanda resumed in 2021 and mining restarted by 2025. But its return has increasingly become a copper story.
In 2025, Mutanda and KCC produced 247,800 t of copper. In H1 2026, their combined copper production rose 66% year on year to 138,400 t.
Cobalt moved in the other direction.
After suspending cobalt exports, the DRC introduced quotas in October 2025. Glencore’s H1 2026 cobalt production from the two operations fell to 8,700 t as it prioritised copper and retained some cobalt in solution.
And then geopolitics arrived at the mine gate.
In February 2026, Glencore and the US-backed Orion Critical Mineral Consortium signed a non-binding MOU under which Orion may acquire 40% of Glencore’s interests in Mutanda and KCC. The proposal implies a combined enterprise value of about US$9bn.
Seven years earlier, falling cobalt prices had helped close Mutanda. Now copper is driving production higher, the DRC is restricting how much cobalt reaches the market, and US-backed capital is seeking an interest in the assets.
The ore did not change.
The calculation around it did.