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A mining group that has former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo on its board is working on as many as 10 potential deals to buy copper mines as it seeks to become a “western supplier” of the in-demand red metal.
Artem Volynets, chief executive of London-listed ACG Metals and a former executive at Russia’s largest aluminium company Rusal, said he was in talks over a range of assets, many of them in the Tethyan Copper Belt — a vast area that spans from Europe to south-east Asia.
“We’re working hard to do a transaction,” Volynets told the FT. “The strategy is to build up as quickly as possible” and acquire mines that were already producing copper or were close to doing so, he added.
ACG completed its first deal in 2024 when it bought the Gediktepe gold and silver mine in western Turkey for $300mn. It aims to begin mining copper at the site this year and plans to expand annual production of the metal to 300,000 tonnes by buying assets around the world.
Surging demand for copper — a conductive industrial metal used in everything from electronics to the data centres that power AI — is spurring on deals that are reshaping the mining sector.
The need to secure access to copper assets was among the reasons behind a planned $60bn merger between Anglo American and Teck Resources and a motivator of talks about a potential combination of Rio Tinto and Glencore.
The prospect of looming shortages has pushed the copper price to a series of records above $13,000 per tonne.
ACG is positioning itself to be a “western supplier”, with the copper from its Turkish mine “likely” to be processed in European smelters, Volynets said.
While ACG would “eventually” expand into Africa and Latin America, many of the assets it was considering were closer to its Gediktepe mine, Volynets said. Africa was becoming “a political battleground between the east and the west” over minerals, he added.
Operational costs in Turkey were falling thanks to the depreciation of the lira to record lows, Volynets said, while some eastern European countries could prove to be “low-cost” places to operate and currently there were “not so many competitors looking to buy” in the region.
Gediktepe already produces gold and silver, with the Turkish Central Bank the primary buyer of the gold. ACG shares have risen by almost 30 per cent since the start of the year.
Minerals have risen up the geopolitical agenda over the past 18 months as western nations including the US have sought to challenge China’s dominance over many metal supply chains.
Pompeo, who sits on ACG’s board as a non-executive director, last year told the FT that the US needed to move faster to secure the supply chains of critical minerals, warning that shortages could threaten national security.
Volynets said it was increasingly important for companies and governments to secure strategic metals because the world was becoming more “isolationist” and appeared to be “getting back to the spheres of influence of 200 years ago”.
“You want to be in a commodity [the price of which is] not controlled by China,” he added, noting that Chinese overproduction has led to a collapse in the prices of battery metals nickel and lithium.