World’s biggest mining companies now worth $2.17 trillion
At the end of July the MINING.COM TOP 50* ranking of the world’s most valuable miners had a combined market capitalization of $2.17 trillion, up $18 billion for the month and holding a gain of $26 billion so far in 2026.
The Top 50 now runs on a monthly clock, and on a new basis: mined metals and minerals only, with coal-heavy counters excluded and every ranking back to the start of the decade recalculated to match (the notes at the bottom set out the rules of the game).
The $545 billion swing
July was a good deal livelier than the 0.8% headline move suggests.
When mining stocks were riding high on gold and copper prices at the end of March, the Top 50 was worth $2.33 trillion. By the end of June, with gold well off its record, that had shrunk to $2.15 trillion.
Stock by stock, the swings are wilder still: valued at each company’s best month-end of the year, the Top 50 would be worth $2.44 trillion. At each one’s worst, just $1.9 trillion. That $545 billion spread is the truer measure of 2026 (and most every other year on commodities markets) so far, in a ranking that never itself strayed far from $2.2 trillion.
The biggest winner and the biggest loser in July were both gold diggers, and neither had much to do with bullion, which waited until August to stage a comeback.
Zijin’s third engine
Zijin Mining added $24 billion of market value in July, up 23.8%, vaulting past Newmont into fourth place at $125 billion. No company gained more dollars, and nothing in the company’s bracket came close on percentage either.
The trigger was a first-half profit alert lodged in early July: net profit guided at roughly RMB 39.1 billion, up 68%, with gold output up 15% to just over 1.5 million ounces and silver edging up to 7.4 million ounces. The number that stands out, though, is lithium: 43,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent against 7,000 tonnes a year earlier, a sixfold ramp pulled off just as the market for the battery metal emerged from a brutal slump.
Xiamen calls lithium the group’s third growth engine, and for once the investor-day language matches the production tables. Anyone reading Zijin’s surge as a copper story should note that consolidated copper output actually fell 6%. Less than a year after becoming only the fourth mining company in history to top $100 billion, Zijin is aiming for the podium.
Polyus pulls the rip cord
At the other end, Polyus surrendered $13.2 billion (down 37.6%) and fell eight places to number 28.
On 8 July the Russian gold miner told shareholders it would suspend dividends until 2030 to fund a wave of investment projects. The stock dropped 26% in a single session, the second-worst day in its history, beaten only by the 27.4% shellacking of 16 September 2008, when Lehman Brothers was setting the mood. It kept sliding for the rest of the month.
The decision baffled a market that watched Polyus mint record earnings and some $2 billion of free cash flow last year, and Sberbank promptly struck the stock from its top picks. One theory doing the rounds in Moscow: the company is bracing for a windfall tax on gold profits, and has budgeted for bullion at a deeply unfashionable $3,100 an ounce. Polyus and Norilsk Nickel, it should be said, keep their standing in this ranking thanks to captive investors on the Moscow Exchange where sanctions have made sellers of many, but exits are few.
Middle Kingdom kings
The rest of July’s winners column reads like a Shanghai gold board: Zhongjin Gold up 21.4%, Shandong Gold up 16.9%, and outside the ranking Chifeng Jilong up more than 50%. It looks like a surge. It is closer to a bounce. Gold spent the first half of 2026 falling roughly 30% from January’s record above $5,590 an ounce, and China’s gold stocks fell considerably harder. Shandong Gold’s peak-to-trough drawdown passed 60% before bargain hunters found a sector trading at around ten times earnings.
Western precious metals went the other way: Fresnillo gave back 10% of its value, Coeur 12.9% and Agnico Eagle 5%, while Newmont slipped just enough for Zijin to relieve Denver of fourth place.
Since this snapshot was taken, gold has bounced again, surging to a seven-week high above $4,400 on Friday after the US economy shed 23,000 jobs in July, the first payrolls contraction since February. Gold bugs will take the help.
Revolving door
The price of admission rose to $13.56 billion, from $13.1 billion at the end of June, not far off the record $14.5 billion set at the end of March and more than four times the $3.2 billion that got a company through the door in 2020.
Western Mining takes the fiftieth spot after a 41.5% July, the biggest percentage move anywhere in the ranking. Casablanca’s Managem, up 106% this year on its gold and cobalt mines across Africa, debuts at 39. Lundin Gold misses by a whisker and is likely back in by the time you read this, joining Tianqi Lithium, which dropped by a quarter, and Alamos Gold.
MMG returns at 49 after a 28.6% month, and South32 re-enters at 45, up 12.2% since agreeing to sell nearly all its aluminium business to Alcoa for up to $5.6 billion. The Perth miner also broke mining’s decade-long US permitting curse in early July, bagging the final federal approval for its $2 billion-plus Hermosa zinc-silver-manganese project in Arizona, with first production pencilled in for early 2028.
The metal that matters for the slimmed-down miner may turn out to be silver: once the Alcoa sale closes, Cannington’s silver-lead-zinc output becomes more than a tenth of revenue, and with silver near $60 an ounce (against under $40 a year ago) and zinc up 26% in 2026, the market is paying up for what South32 is keeping, not just what it sold.
Then there is Amman Mineral, the ranking’s resident rollercoaster. The Indonesian copper-gold miner stormed into the Top 50 after its blockbuster 2023 debut, ran up nearly 600% to pierce the top 10 (minting half a dozen billionaires along the way), then surrendered roughly three quarters of its peak value as smelter commissioning and concentrate headaches set in, bottoming out dead last at number 50 in the Q2 count. In July it rose 25.7% to reclaim 42nd.
Baar sets a higher bar
Two days ago Glencore reported the kind of first half that headline writers call blowout: adjusted EBITDA of $10.1 billion, up 86%, a fresh $500 million buyback, and confirmation of a secondary Sydney listing for October. Copper output rose 15% just as the metal hit records, and the trading desks feasted on a volatile oil market.
The July snapshot caught the run-up: up 7.6% for the month and 34% for the year at $86 billion, Baar is firmly ensconced at number 7. It is easy to forget Glencore spent stretches of 2020 and 2021 outside the top 10 altogether and traded below its 2011 London IPO price for the better part of fifteen years.
There is a wrinkle in the timing. The six-month standstill Rio Tinto accepted when it walked away from their $260 billion mega-merger in February lapsed this week, and Melbourne promptly signalled it is in no rush to come back to the table. On numbers like these, Baar can afford to play hard to get.
Rio arrives at the standstill’s end in decent shape of its own, having just posted its highest first-half earnings in four years as the data centre boom feeds copper demand. Though on this ranking’s own 1.5 times revenue test (see the notes below) Rio is, strictly speaking, an iron ore company enjoying editorial clemency.
Vale gets no such pass. Filed under iron ore while the long-promised Toronto listing of its base metals unit waits, the Brazilian miner posted a 35% fall in second-quarter profit and narrowed its nickel and copper output outlook.
The air up there
BHP has added $62 billion of market value in 2026, a 41% gain no other big cap approaches in dollar terms, reaching $216 billion and sitting comfortably above the double-century mark Melbourne was first to breach. July’s production report showed record iron ore output from the Pilbara, with full-year results due mid-month.
The $50 billion of air between the world’s biggest miner and Rio Tinto (the unbroken pair at the top) is now the widest gap between first and second in the history of this ranking. It is a remarkable turn from 2024, when the lead had thinned to $15 billion. One stock accounts for a tenth of the Top 50’s entire value.
Club rules
Melbourne is where the money lives: BHP, Rio Tinto and MMG make the Victorian capital a $395 billion head-office town, nearly a fifth of the entire ranking. Toronto’s four entries are worth $204 billion, Mexico City’s two $177 billion, Denver’s three $156 billion and Vancouver’s five $141 billion.
The gap to Toronto vanishes the day Anglo Teck books its head office in British Columbia, and that day is drawing closer. The $53 billion merger has cleared its shareholder votes and every regulator bar one, waiting only on Beijing, with completion expected by early 2027.
The corner offices are already settling: Anglo executives take three of the four top jobs, with Duncan Wanblad leading the combined group from Vancouver. Anglo shareholders will own 62.4% of the company after banking a $4.5 billion special dividend, and Teck investors 37.6%, with each Teck share exchanged for 1.3301 Anglo shares. For now, Anglo American and Teck ride at 13 and 21.
When the deal closes, the combined company also changes columns. Under the ranking’s rules Anglo Teck lands under copper, which is exactly how the pair are selling it: about 1.2 million tonnes of output a year, rising to 1.35 million tonnes in 2027 from six large operations across Chile, Peru and Canada, with $800 million in annual pre-tax savings pencilled in by year four.
After a divestment program that has spun off its platinum arm, sold coal and nickel, and set De Beers on its way out the door, the reclassification makes it official: Anglo’s century-plus run as a diversified mining giant ends here.
The next count lands at the end of August. On July’s evidence, a month is plenty.
No comments:
Post a Comment