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Paul Obambi has been granted a prospecting licence over 253 square kilometres in the Republic of Congo, moving the country's largest private operator from iron ore into tin as national extractive output falls.
The government awarded the authorisation to Plamex-Ressources, a company belonging to Obambi, for cassiterite. The mineral is tin dioxide, the principal raw material for tin, used in solder for printed circuit boards and in food packaging.
The decision was formalised by an order dated April 18, signed by Pierre Oba, minister of state for mining industries and geology, and published in the Journal Officiel on June 4. It followed an application Obambi submitted late in 2025.
The concession sits in Kouilou, the coastal department that contains Pointe-Noire, Congo's commercial capital and its main port.
Timing matters on two fronts. Tin prices have been rising, driven by demand from electronics manufacturing and by supply disruption at established producers. And Congolese extractive production has been contracting, according to the first-quarter economic report published by the authorities, which makes a new permit award unusual in the current climate.
Obambi already runs one of the country's most ambitious mining projects. He is managing director of Sapro Mayoko, which produces and exports iron ore from a deposit he acquired from South Africa's Exxaro Resources in 2016 in a transaction valued at about $350 million.
The constraint on that project has always been transport. Obambi has spent years pursuing a 450-kilometre railway to carry ore from Mayoko, in the interior, to a port at Pointe-Noire, and told Bloomberg he was negotiating with a consortium of French banks to finance it.
The new permit sits within a considerably larger group. Obambi founded Sapro after acquiring the Congolese removals company DEMECO in 1990, selling it and using the proceeds to create Translo in 1992, a business handling oil equipment transit and container yard management at Pointe-Noire.
Sapro expanded from there into soap, beverages and plastics manufacturing, oil through Sapro Oil, advertising through Média International, property through SCIA and construction through Getrab. Jeune Afrique put group turnover above 320 billion CFA francs, about 488 million euros, in 2008, with operations spanning Congo, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Côte d'Ivoire. He has since added energy through Energaz and port infrastructure management.
La Lettre du Continent described him in 2016 as the leading private operator in the Republic of Congo.
Obambi was born in Brazzaville in December 1954. He has presided over the Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Agriculture and Trades of Brazzaville since 1997, was made a Chevalier of Senegal's Ordre national du Lion in 2005, and appeared on a ranking of the fifty leading African managers in 2007.
Accounts of his education differ. EcoMatin describes him as an engineer trained at the École Polytechnique de l'Université de Montréal. Other records describe him as an economist who studied at the Université Marien Ngouabi in Brazzaville before specialising in economics and financial analysis in Toulouse.
Neither Plamex-Ressources nor Sapro has disclosed what it intends to spend on exploration, or over what period.
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