# CMOC The Chinese miner that became the world's largest cobalt producer by buying two Congolese mines from an American company, then produced so much of it that it crashed the global price and provoked a Congolese export ban. ## The two assets, and where they came from - **Tenke Fungurume (TFM)** — acquired from **Freeport-McMoRan in 2016** - **Kisanfu (KFM)** — acquired from Freeport-McMoRan in **2020** That provenance is the whole geopolitical story in one line. The assets now cited as evidence of Chinese dominance of the cobalt supply chain were sold to China by a US company, in ordinary commercial transactions, while American policy was elsewhere. ## Scale CMOC overtook [[Glencore]] as the world's largest cobalt producer in 2023. **2024 output: 114,165 tonnes — nearly double 2023's 55,526 tonnes**, and far above its own 70,000-tonne guidance. **2025: a record 117,549 tonnes.** The ramp-up worked exactly as an oversupply strategy should. Cobalt fell from a post-COVID peak above $77,000/tonne to roughly **$22,000/tonne in 2025**, a nine-year low. That price collapse is what triggered the DRC's February 2025 export ban and the ARECOMS quota regime that replaced it in October 2025. CMOC's response to the quotas has been to keep producing. 2026 guidance was held at 100,000–120,000 tonnes against an export entitlement of roughly **31,200 tonnes** — that is, deliberate stockpiling on the expectation that Kinshasa will eventually relax the constraint. It is a straightforward test of who blinks: the swing producer with a state behind it, or the state that discovered it could be a swing producer. ## Context More than half of DRC cobalt production is Chinese-owned, and Chinese firms were projected to control roughly 46% of global cobalt production by 2030 — a figure that predates the February 2026 [[Glencore]]–Orion transaction, which if completed would be the first material dilution. The broader pattern is on [[Critical Minerals]]: finding ore is rarely the bottleneck; **refining is**, and [[China]] holds roughly 70% of global refining capacity across nineteen of twenty strategic minerals. Congolese cobalt is the upstream half of that story. ## See also [[Glencore]] · [[Gécamines]] · [[Critical Minerals]] · [[Conflict Minerals Ecosystem]] · [[China]]