Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal is building what would be Africa's largest copper smelter

Konkola Copper Mines said on Thursday, Sept. 17 that it is building a new smelter in Zambia that will add 70,000 tonnes of capacity a year, and that it expects the plant to be the largest of its kind in Africa.

The company has awarded the work to the Chinese engineering group NERIN, though the contract has not taken effect and depends on conditions including an advance payment. Konkola has not said what the smelter will cost or when it will be finished.

Anil Agarwal controls the mine. His London-registered Vedanta Resources holds 79.4% of Konkola through a subsidiary called CopperTech Metals, and ZCCM Investments Holdings, the Zambian state's mining investment company, owns the remaining 20.6%.

The announcement came days before the smelter Konkola already has came back to life. The Nchanga plant at Chingola, in the Copperbelt province near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, cast its first anode after a 106-day shutdown, which Konkola confirmed on Monday, Sept. 21. The stoppage had been announced on May 29 as a 60-day refurbishment, so it ran 46 days longer than planned.

Zambia took the mine away from Vedanta once. The government placed Konkola in provisional liquidation in 2019, accusing the company of lying about its expansion plans and paying too little tax, and the two sides spent five years in dispute. Vedanta regained control in 2024 after agreeing a court-approved plan and paying about $246 million to creditors.

Getting it back came with promises. Vedanta committed to spend more than $1.2 billion over five years upgrading the operation and settling debts, and has put in more than $400 million since resuming management, including $250 million to clear creditors and a further instalment of $124 million.

CopperTech Metals, which Vedanta launched in the United States in November 2025 to own and run Konkola, has said it intends to invest another $1.5 billion on top of roughly $3 billion Vedanta has already spent on the mine since 2004.

What justifies that is the rock. Konkola holds about 16 million tonnes of contained copper at a grade of 2.3%, far richer than the deposits that make South America the world's main source of the metal, and it carries cobalt reserves as well. The ore sits deep underground beneath enormous volumes of water, which makes it one of the wettest mines anywhere and expensive to keep dry.

Vedanta has said it wants Konkola producing 300,000 tonnes of copper and 6,000 tonnes of cobalt a year, and CopperTech set a longer-term ambition of 500,000 tonnes when it launched.

Zambia wants more than that. President Hakainde Hichilema urged Vedanta on Sept. 10 to move faster on building its own power generation for the mine, and his government is targeting three million tonnes of national copper output within a decade. Copper accounts for more than 70% of what Zambia earns from exports, and every additional tonne needs electricity the grid does not currently have.

Agarwal began in scrap metal in Bombay and built Vedanta by buying state assets, acquiring Bharat Aluminium in 2001 and Hindustan Zinc in 2002 from the Indian government. He listed Vedanta Resources in London in 2003, the first Indian company to float there, and took it private again in 2018.