Copper OptionalityNarrow moat

The most forward-looking part of Barrick is not gold at all but copper, and the 2025 renaming from Barrick Gold to Barrick Mining was the company planting a flag on it¹. Copper today is a modest slice of revenue, but it is growing, and its strategic logic is strong: copper is the metal the electrification of everything — grids, wind, solar, electric vehicles, data centres — needs in enormous and rising quantity, at a time when new copper supply is as hard to bring on as new gold.

Barrick's copper is anchored by two assets: the Lumwana mine in Zambia, now the subject of a large expansion that would roughly double its output, and Reko Diq in Pakistan — one of the largest undeveloped copper-gold deposits in the world, a multi-decade project Barrick is building in partnership with the Pakistani state. Between them they give the company a genuine second growth leg and exposure to a metal with arguably better long-term fundamentals than gold.

This is real optionality, and it may be the piece of Barrick the market least appreciates. But temper it with two truths. Copper is every bit as much a price-taken commodity as gold, so the copper business is no more a moat than the gold one — it simply diversifies the price Barrick is exposed to. And Reko Diq sits in Pakistan, carrying exactly the political and execution risk that its scale implies. Copper broadens and modernizes the story, and could re-rate the stock if it delivers — but it changes the size and shape of the bet, not its fundamental nature.