Emerging copper producer Copper 360 has raised R274m to fund its acquisition of Nama Copper and expand production at its Rietberg mine, both in the Northern Cape.
“Further equity and royalty commitments for a further R50m is being negotiated that could see the total capital number increase to R324m,” the company, valued at about R2.5bn on the JSE, said on Thursday.
The bulk of the money raised was through debt funding of R189m and the rest by new equity of R85m. The new equity represents less than 6% of total issued share capital.
Copper 360 claims that Nama Copper, bought from Mazule Resources and situated next to its operations in Nababeep, will ensure that it doubles its production in its 2025 financial year.
“We will have three new copper processing plants in production by February 2025 and our new Rietberg copper mine comes online early in 2025,” CEO Jan Nelson said. “The bottom line is we forecast to deliver R1bn more in copper sales than originally planned at listing, which more than easily justified the slight dilution to shareholders as 70% of new capital is financed through debt.”
The new total production forecast for the 2025 financial year is 9,789 tonnes of copper metal and 14,778 tonnes in 2026.
The group is the only pure copper player on the local bourse and has built a hydrometallurgical plant that extracts the metal from oxide resources in Nababeep and surroundings near Springbok in the Northern Cape.
Copper is used in the production of electric vehicles and the wiring of wind turbines.
The debt funding was obtained from the local Diaruk and Darmane companies, Canada’s Handa Mining Corporation and Singapore’s High West Capital Partners, with the bulk coming from the latter two.
Nelson is the CEO of Handa, and Copper 360 director Marcel Golding also serves as the director of Darmane.
The loans from these two companies are deemed related-party transactions, leading to Copper 360 hiring Bridge Capital Advisors to provide an independent opinion in line with the JSE’s listing requirements.
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