WITH the sale of Jubilee Metals’ South African chrome and platinum group metals assets now complete, the company is officially a pure-play copper story.
Just as importantly, its investment in its own copper mines in Zambia means Jubilee is no longer mainly a processing business dependent on third-party feed. It has become a resource company in its own right, with earnings and valuation that should track commodity prices – now exclusively copper – far more closely than before.
That shift matters, because if there is one thing most commodity analysts broadly agree on, it is that copper has the strongest long-term supply and demand fundamentals of any major metal. Demand driven by electrification, decarbonisation and the energy transition is rising steadily, while new supply is struggling to keep up, setting the scene for structural deficits over the next few decades.
By comparison, Jubilee’s former chrome and PGM exposure sat in markets either heavily influenced by China or facing a more uncertain long-term demand outlook.
If 2025 was about restructuring and transition, 2026 is clearly about execution and delivery for Jubilee. The Zambian copper business had a difficult 2025 financial year, with the most material challenge being infrastructure constraints – most notably an unreliable power supply. Those issues were made worse by how tightly integrated and interdependent Jubilee’s Zambian operation had become. When something went wrong in one part of the system, the disruption quickly cascaded through the entire value chain.
Management’s response was to re-engineer the business into three largely independent “pillars,” each designed to operate and grow with far greater autonomy.
The first pillar is the Roan concentrator, which focuses on processing third-party copper ore. The second is an integrated mine-to-metals operation built around Jubilee’s Molefe open-pit copper mine feeding into the Sable refinery, giving the group direct exposure to mined copper volumes.
Finally, there’s the Large Waste Project, a surface tailings recovery initiative that reprocesses historical waste material to extract residual copper, turning legacy dumps into an additional, low-risk source of feed. Together, these three pillars allow Jubilee to grow copper production in parallel, with far less risk that problems in one area derail overall targets.
The early signs that the new structure is working are already showing in the numbers. In the first quarter of the 2026 financial year (July to September 2025), Jubilee’s copper production jumped to 938 tons, a 65% increase on the previous quarter and almost half of what the group produced in the whole of 2025.
The Roan concentrator was the standout. With a secure power supply in place, Roan ran without any material outages during the quarter and produced 917 tons of copper concentrate. Attention has now shifted to optimisation. Jubilee is expanding Roan’s filtering capacity by 30%, which should remove a bottleneck in drying concentrate and speed up deliveries to the refinery. By the end of 2026 financial, the target is for Roan to process 40,000 tons of ore a month, up from roughly 30,000 tons currently.
At the same time, Molefe and the Sable refinery are shaping up as Jubilee’s second growth engine. After a year of development work, the Molefe open-pit mine restarted in September 2025 following a successful pit expansion. As Molefe ramps up toward a targeted mining rate of 8,500 tons a month by early 2026, it should be delivering roughly 170 tons of contained copper each month.
There’s scope to further increase copper output at Molefe in the short term. Currently high-grade ore – typically running at around 2% to 2.5% copper – is sent straight to Sable for processing and immediate cash flow, while lower-grade material is stockpiled. That stockpile has already grown beyond two million tons at roughly 0.7% copper. Jubilee plans to process this material using a modular on-site plant, with the first unit expected to come online in the second half of 2026 and the flexibility to add further modules over time.
The Large Waste Project is focused on adding to Jubilee’s longer-term growth pipeline. The project targets roughly 240 million tons of historical tailings left behind by previous operators, which still contain recoverable copper. If Jubilee can economically reprocess this material, it offers the potential for steady copper production over many years without the cost and risk that come with conventional mining. By the end of March 2026, management expects to have a formal resource estimate and a clear plan in place for how this material would be reclaimed and processed.
Galileo JV
Jubilee is also looking to quantify and grow its resource base. To that end, it has partnered with exploration specialist Galileo Resources to fast-track drilling and resource definition at Molefe. Under the deal, Galileo will spend $700,000 on exploration in return for the option to earn up to a 23.75% stake in the Molefe holding company.
In practice, this brings in a specialist to handle the geology and drilling, while Jubilee focuses on its core expertise of mining and processing.
Just as importantly, putting a clearer value on the copper in the ground gives investors something more tangible to anchor to, which could help support a rerating over time. Beyond Molefe itself, Jubilee has also secured over 25,000 hectares of exploration licenses in the surrounding district, which could host several copper deposits similar to Molefe.
Jubilee is guiding for copper production of between 4,500 and 5,100 tons in the 2026 financial year. At current copper prices, that equates to roughly R1bn in revenues. So far, the ramp-up appears to be on track, with first-quarter output already sitting at about 20% of the full-year midpoint.
Against a market capitalisation of around R3bn, this implies a relatively modest sales-to-equity multiple for a miner that is still in growth mode, particularly when set against its longer-term goal of producing 25,000 tons of copper a year.
Revenue, of course, is not the same as profit, and investors will want to see improving earnings as volumes rise and operations stabilise. Here, Jubilee has a clear edge over many junior miners. In addition to already having substantial infrastructure in place, the proceeds from the sale of its South African assets give it the flexibility to fund further expansion with minimal reliance on new debt or shareholder dilution.
There is still plenty that needs to go right. Jubilee has to deliver on its ramp-up plans, keep a lid on costs, and show that its streamlined, copper-only portfolio can generate sustainable profits. Like any miner, it also faces execution risks, from infrastructure constraints and weather disruptions to the successful delivery of plant upgrades.
That said, the broader fundamentals are supportive. If management executes as planned, the value unlock could be meaningful, and any clear demonstration of substantial copper resources under Jubilee’s control may be the catalyst that finally drives a more decisive rerating of a share price that has only just started to reflect the new Jubilee.
