“All eyes are on Zambia,” says Peter Major, director of mining at
Mergence Corporate Solutions in South Africa. Major spoke in Cape Town in
October as he prepared for a mining investment trip to Zambia. In the new
president, Hakainde Hichilema, he says, the country has “a real businessman” in
charge.
With billions of dollars worth of African gas, gold, copper and cobalt
to hit the markets in 2022, industry players are focused on the next big deals.
The election of a new government in Zambia in August 2021 has led to optimism
that the country is the stand-out player in African minerals exploration for
2022.
Mining was the only sector of the Zambian economy to decline in the
second quarter of 2021, when copper production dropped 9%, hurt by the impact
of Covid-19 and the first-quarter rainy season. This meant the country was
unable to fully capitalise on the high copper prices, which peaked in May,
according to economist Yvonne Mhango at Renaissance Capital.
Erasmus predicts that copper prices going forward will see a moderate
but sustained decline, amplified by monetary policy normalisation in the US and
the risk of a Chinese slowdown driven by stresses in the country’s property
sector. These headwinds, Erasmus argues, will ensure that Hichilema will remain
“mindful of the urgency to strengthen copper output”.
Extracting the rare earth minerals, a set of 17 metallic elements used
for high-tech applications such as cell phones, computer hard drives and
electric vehicles, maybe an African industry of the future. China dominates the
global supply of rare earths with an estimated share of 85%-90%, but Covid-19
and US-China tensions have sharpened the need for the world to find non-Chinese
sources.
“The US is trying desperately not to buy rare earth from China,” Simon
Gardner-Bond, chief technical officer at Dublin-based TechMet, told a briefing
in October. “The whole world is becoming increasingly nervous about China
controlling the supply chain."
By ARNBETHNIC
Source: https://copperbeltkatangamining.com/zambia-the-stand-out-player-in-african-minerals-exploration-for-2022-experts/