NUR-SULTAN

Kazakhstan’s major mining group, Kazakhmys, reported an annual rise in the exploration of ore and production of gold, silver and copper in the first nine months of the year.

Kazakhmys has key assets concentrated in mining and non-ferrous metallurgy. It is the world’s 20th largest producer of copper in concentrate and the 12th largest producer of blister and cathode copper.

The company said it had produced 22.714 million tonnes of ore in January-September this year, up from 21.620 million tonnes in the same period last year. Around 23.4 million tonnes of ore had been processed at the company’s all enterprises. The content of copper in ore rose to 0.95 percent from the projected 0.90 percent.

The company produced 166,700 tonnes of cathode copper, 4,394 kg of gold, 2.3 percent up from January-September last year and 207,748 kg of silver, 5 percent up from the same period in 2020.

“We have exceeded many performance targets in the nine months of this year and this is not the limit, of course,” Andrey Gaidin, the corporation’s first deputy chairman of the board, said in a statement.

“In many ways, we are helped by the price conjuncture for copper in the global market and the shortage of our metal in the world markets, so we have the reserve to increase production,” he added.

In the second half of 2021, Kazakhmys plans to produce 123,800 tonnes of cathode copper. For the whole year, the company plans to produce 35 million tonnes of ore.

“This will happen due to the introduction of new deposits and the modernisation of existing mines, as well as the maximum load of existing factories and the construction of new enterprises,” Gaidin said.

New processing plants will be launched in the Zhezkazgan and Balkhash regions, while the Nurkazgan processing plant will be modernised in the Karaganda region.

In 2020, Kazakhmys produced 279 tonnes of silver or 51 percent of the metal produced in Central Asia. This helped Kazakhstan to become the 11th producer of silver in the world.