The playbook — copper · September 8, 2026
Ivanhoe grows its Congo copper discovery by 30%
The Makoko District resource jumps to 612 Mt Inferred at 1.80% copper — big numbers, most still at the lowest confidence tier.
On September 8, 2026, Ivanhoe Mines told the market it had grown its Western Forelands copper discovery in the Democratic Republic of Congo by 30%. The centerpiece is the Makoko District, sitting right next to the company’s already-producing Kamoa-Kakula complex. Per the press release, the updated resource now stands at 34 million tonnes of Indicated material grading 2.66% copper — meaning every hundred tonnes of rock carries more than two and a half tonnes of metal — plus a much larger 612 million tonnes of Inferred material at 1.80% copper. That Inferred pile alone holds roughly 11 million tonnes of contained copper. The known mineral zone now stretches 16 kilometres and is still open to the northeast and downward.
Why it matters: grades near 1.8 to 2.7% copper are exceptional for sedimentary-hosted copper, the kind of deposit where 1% is often a good day. The location does real work too — Kamoa-Kakula is a proven, world-scale mine in the same rock type next door, which lowers the geological guesswork on Makoko. The team knows the neighbourhood. CEO Marna Cloete, appointed in February 2025, spent nearly two decades inside Ivanhoe and led Kamoa-Kakula from development into production. Founder Robert Friedland remains the strategic force. Against copper’s 8.5% rise over three months, the stock returned 12.8%, confirming its leverage to the metal — though it trailed the COPX peer basket, which gained 17.2%, and dipped near 9.80 mid-period before recovering to 12.96.
What to watch, and the honest limits. The bulk of that contained copper — 612 million tonnes of Inferred versus 34 million tonnes of Indicated — sits in the Inferred category, drilled at wide 200-by-400-metre spacing, the lowest-confidence tier. The release itself notes Inferred material may not convert to Reserves. True widths are given as a blanket 85% to 90% of downhole length, a generalized estimate rather than hole-by-hole geometry. This is a resource update, not individual drill results, so no per-hole grades were disclosed. The qualified person, Simon Bottoms, is explicitly not independent of Ivanhoe, and a new estimation method complicates comparison to prior figures. According to the September 8 press release, an upsized 120,000-metre infill program is set to begin in Q4 2026, aiming to convert 30 to 40% of the Inferred tonnes to Indicated. A further mineral resource update is planned for 2027, with the Makoko scoping study slated to commence Q1 2027.