Congo Seeks Private Partners for New Cobalt Buying Company

KINSHASA (Capital Markets in Africa) – The Democratic Republic of Congo is looking for private partners to help fund a government-owned company created to buy all the country’s hand-mined cobalt.

The new monopoly is aimed at better regulating small-scale mining and giving Congo an influence over cobalt prices. The country produces more than 60% of the world’s cobalt, an essential ingredient in lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles, and some 20% of the metal is hand-dug by workers referred to as artisanal miners.

Entreprise Generale du Cobalt was created last year by state-miner Gecamines and is currently looking for financing partners, Mines Minister Willy Kitobo Samsoni said Monday at the African Mining Indaba in Cape Town. The new company will be run by its own board and will probably start operating by June, he said.

“If the state can’t find the funds to buy all the artisanal product, the state necessarily will have to enter into a partnership with a company,” Kitobo said. “There are already talks to finance this,” he said, without offering more details.

EGC and a new regulatory authority known as ARECOMS will identify artisanal mining areas where they can monitor the cobalt supply and prohibit the presence of child labor, Kitobo said. The sites will need a “certificate of conformity” in order to market their minerals as will any industrial buyers of artisanally mined cobalt, he said. Unregulated artisanal mines will be closed, Kitobo said.

“The regulatory authority is working with industrials and diggers to determine the price” of the artisanally mined cobalt, Kitobo said. EGC is establishing four depots in the provinces of Lualaba and Haut Katanga to collect the minerals, he said.

Eventually, the state monopoly will extend to artisanally mined coltan and germanium.

“We first want to master the cobalt because the quantity of artisanal cobalt has become important,” Kitobo said.

He said the state’s monopoly on artisanal cobalt buying will be temporary, but didn’t give an expiration date. “The monopoly is a monopoly at the beginning and once we are able to

Source: Bloomberg Business News