Glencore's H1 2026 Half-Year Production Report shows attributable ferrochrome production — its 79.5% share of the Glencore-Merafe Chrome Venture — at just 110,000 tonnes, down 75% (323,000 tonnes) from 433,000 tonnes in H1 2025, with the company noting that chrome smelting "remained largely on care and maintenance during H1 2026." Taken alone, that headline figure reads as a continuation of the collapse already documented at Merafe Resources. But Glencore's quarterly breakdown adds a detail not visible in the half-year number alone: production fell from 156kt in Q2 2025 to just 3kt in Q3 2025 and effectively nil in Q4 2025, before climbing back to 13kt in Q1 2026 and then jumping to 97kt in Q2 2026 — a roughly sevenfold quarter-on-quarter increase.
Glencore explicitly ties this rebound to "a phased restart of operations commencing at the Lion smelter," confirming that output bottomed out around late 2025 and was already recovering well before the half-year closed. Read alongside Merafe's own report — which cited continued suspensions at Wonderkop and Boshoek but only a partial suspension at Lion — Glencore's figures confirm Lion as the first of the Venture's smelters to begin ramping back up. The scale of the H1 year-on-year decline therefore somewhat understates the improving trajectory within the period itself, positioning H2 2026 as the more meaningful test of whether the recovery extends to Wonderkop and Boshoek as well.
