Glencore's Quarterly Data Reveals Ferrochrome Production Already Rebounding at the Lion Smelter

As Zimbabwe's easily mined alluvial chrome deposits approach exhaustion, small-scale miners are being pushed toward hard-rock lumpy chrome, a shift that Chrome Miners Association of Zimbabwe chairperson Shelton Lucas says is straining the sector's economics. Unlike alluvial chrome, which could be extracted with limited capital and equipment, hard-rock ore requires drilling, blasting, crushing and heavier mechanization, pushing production costs beyond the reach of many operators. Lucas said this cost pressure is compounded by Zimbabwe's ban on raw chrome ore exports, introduced to encourage local beneficiation and smelter investment. With a limited number of domestic smelters absorbing ore, miners have fewer buyers to sell into and correspondingly weaker pricing power, leaving them, in Lucas's words, exposed to predatory pricing from Chinese-owned smelter operators even as extraction costs climb. To rebalance the market, Lucas proposed government-backed toll smelting, an arrangement under which miners would pay a processing fee while retaining ownership of their chrome, allowing them to sell the processed product rather than raw ore at prices set unilaterally by smelter operators. Zimbabwe's Ministry of Mines has pointed to investment in mining infrastructure, energy supply and operational efficiency as necessary to sustain output, though no toll-smelting facility has yet been confirmed. Whether such a mechanism materializes will be a key test of how much pricing leverage Zimbabwe's ore miners can claw back as the sector's hard-rock transition deepens.

In late May, driven by news stimulus and expectations for future demand, tantalum prices once rallied sharply, with tantalum ore prices surging to 240–245 US dollars per ton-unit.

Zimbabwe's chrome production fell 61.7% year-on-year in Q1 2026, dropping to 178,425 mt from 465,638 mt in the prior-year period, according to the country's Ministry of Mines and Mining Development. The decline ranks among the steepest recorded across Zimbabwe's major minerals for the quarter. The Chrome Miners Association of Zimbabwe attributes the contraction to the exhaustion of alluvial chrome deposits, the loose, near-surface sediment that has historically supplied the bulk of the country's output and underpinned its artisanal and small-scale mining sector. Association chairperson Shelton Lucas said replenishment of these deposits occurs only through slow sedimentary processes, leaving no near-term prospect of alluvial supply recovering to prior levels. With alluvial sources depleting, Zimbabwean miners are increasingly turning to lumpy chrome locked in hard-rock formations, a resource that demands drilling, blasting, crushing and greater mechanization to extract. That shift raises the capital and cost threshold for participation in a sector still dominated by small-scale operators, positioning the pace and terms of Zimbabwe's transition to hard-rock mining as a key swing factor for the country's chrome supply going forward.