KGHM seeks copper mines closer to home to reduce logistics costs

Copper producer KGHM is looking to invest in mines in Europe and Morocco to secure ore supplies closer to its smelting base in Poland and lower logistics costs, the company’s CEO said on Wednesday.

KGHM, which operates the Robinson mine in the US and holds 55% in Sierra Gorda in Chile on top of its Polish assets, last month signed a memorandum with Morocco’s National Office of Hydrocarbons and Mines and Moroccan mining firm Managem Group on cooperation in raw materials.

“We are looking for opportunities to have some resource closer to our smelting sites in Poland,” KGHM CEO Remigiusz Paszkiewicz told Reuters in an interview at the company’s Chile branch office in Santiago.

“Morocco is a good one. There is also at least one in Europe itself, an opportunity for us. We are now checking the chemistry of the deposit, let’s say,” he added, declining to identify which European company KGHM was looking at.

KGHM has dispatched geologists to Morocco and is waiting for an initial report from them, Paszkiewicz said, adding that the results could come in the next two weeks.

The Moroccan mine would serve as a source of supply to the global market as well as KGHM, he explained, as the company wants to remain active in concentrates trading. Just over half KGHM’s 710,000 metric tons of copper production in 2025 came from its own concentrates.

State-backed KGHM intends to maintain investment in Polish mining, even as it also looks at opportunities further afield in Chile and Argentina, Paszkiewicz said.

“But we see that the world is still changing,” he added, raising the possibility of switching KGHM’s Legnica copper smelter to a recycling plant.

“Probably it is … written down in the draft of our strategy that step by step we will be moving in the direction that Legnica is recycling and Glogow is our main smelting factory,” Paszkiewicz said.

KGHM will unveil its new strategy at the end of the quarter.

The company is also looking to extend its “production chain” in the United States, Paszkiewicz said, stressing that this did not necessarily mean building a copper smelter there.

(By Tom Daly; Editing by Lincoln Feast)