• RioZim's Q1 2026 gold output at Renco Mine surged to 92 kilograms from just 6 kilograms in Q1 2025, a volume that already exceeds the group’s entire 2025 full-year production
• Driven by an average Q1 2026 gold price of $4,873 per ounce ($156,617 per kg), Renco Mine generated $14.4 million in gross revenue in three months
• While the return of a dewatered Cam & Motor Mine in Q2 signals an operational reversal for RioZim, the group still faces an long-term funding gap

Harare- Resuscitating mining giant, RioZim Limited has produced 92 kilograms of gold in the first quarter of 2026 from Renco Mine, an exponential increase from the 6 kilograms produced in the same quarter of 2025, while Cam & Motor Mine recorded no production during the quarter consistent with the prior year comparative period, with dewatering of the flooded Cam pits completed before the end of the quarter and production resuming in the second quarter.

The Group's full-year gold production in 2025 was 84 kilograms. Renco Mine's first-quarter 2026 output of 92 kilograms alone therefore exceeds the entire 2025 annual production by 9.5%, before Cam & Motor has contributed a single gram to the 2026 total.

The production history across RioZim, Padenga Holdings, and Caledonia Mining is the most analytically instructive dataset in Zimbabwe's gold sector, because it documents three different strategic responses to the same operating environment over the same decade and produces three completely different outcomes whose divergence is now extreme.

RioZim peaked at 2,071 kilograms of annual gold production in 2017, making it at that point the second-largest gold producer among Zimbabwe's three listed gold producers, behind Caledonia's 1,750 kilograms but substantially ahead of Padenga's 484 kilograms. By 2025, RioZim's production had fallen to 84 kilograms, a 95.9% collapse over eight years.

Caledonia, by contrast, grew from 1,570 kilograms in 2016 to a peak of 2,510 kilograms in 2022, maintaining above 2,370 kilograms through 2025. Padenga, which was producing 429 kilograms in 2016 at roughly one-quarter of RioZim's output, grew to 2,638 kilograms in 2024, surpassing RioZim in 2022 and now producing more than 30 times RioZim's 2025 annual output from a standing start that was significantly below RioZim's position a decade earlier.

The chart makes the divergence visual and the arithmetic makes it stark. In 2016, RioZim was the largest of the three by production. By 2025, RioZim was producing 84 kilograms against Padenga's 2,564 kilograms and Caledonia's 2,370 kilograms. The combined output of Padenga and Caledonia in 2025 was 4,934 kilograms. RioZim's contribution to that peer group's aggregate production fell from 40.7% in 2016 to 1.7% in 2025. No operational narrative about flooding, maintenance costs, or capital access adequately explains a 96% collapse in the company that was once the sector leader among listed gold producers. The production data describes a company that systematically failed to reinvest in mine development at the rate required to sustain and grow output, while its peers did the opposite.

Caledonia's consistency is the most instructive comparison. From 1,570 kilograms in 2016 to 2,370 kilograms in 2025, Caledonia has never recorded a year below its 2016 baseline and has maintained above 2,100 kilograms since 2021. That consistency reflects disciplined capital allocation to underground development, processing plant maintenance, and the power supply solutions including solar and backup generation that allowed Blanket Mine to maintain throughput while the national grid remained unreliable. Caledonia's production stability across the same period in which RioZim's output collapsed by 96% is the direct result of the investment decisions the two companies made differently.

Padenga's trajectory is the more dramatic story. Growing from 429 kilograms in 2016 to a peak of 2,638 kilograms in 2024 through its Eureka and Pickstone-Peerless mines, Padenga's 514% production increase over nine years in an operating environment that RioZim has cited as the primary cause of its own collapse demonstrates that the environment alone does not determine outcomes. Capital was available to companies that demonstrated the operational credibility to access it. Padenga accessed it. RioZim did not.

The average gold price increased 70% from USD 2,861 per ounce in the first quarter of 2025 to USD 4,873 per ounce in the first quarter of 2026. At USD 4,873 per ounce, the kilogram price of gold is approximately USD 156,617.

At this price, Renco Mine's 92 kilograms in Q1 2026 generated approximately USD 14.4 million in gross gold revenue in a single quarter. The entire 2025 annual production of 84 kilograms, at an average 2025 gold price of approximately USD 2,800 per ounce or approximately USD 90,000 per kilogram, generated approximately USD 7.6 million across the full year. Renco Mine alone in three months at the current gold price has already generated nearly twice the gross revenue the entire group produced across all of 2025.

The implications for the second quarter and the full year are more significant. Cam & Motor Mine has resumed production in the second quarter of 2026. RioZim's pre-collapse production history shows Cam & Motor as a materially larger contributor than Renco when both are operating normally.

If the Q2 2026 recovery brings Cam & Motor to even a fraction of its historical output potential alongside Renco's improving trajectory, the combined quarterly production for the second quarter will substantially exceed the 92 kilograms Renco delivered in Q1. At USD 4,873 per ounce, every additional kilogram of production generates approximately USD 156,617 in gross gold revenue.

The difference between producing 200 kilograms per quarter and producing 500 kilograms per quarter at this gold price is approximately USD 47 million in annualised gross revenue.

The gold price tailwind is not guaranteed to persist. Goldman Sachs' end-2026 forecast of USD 4,900 per ounce suggests the current price environment may be sustained through the remainder of the year, but gold price forecasting at the USD 4,873 level involves geopolitical risk assumptions around the US-Iran conflict and the US-China trade environment whose resolution timelines are genuinely uncertain.

What is certain is that every month of production at two operational mines into a USD 4,873 gold price is worth materially more to RioZim than a full year of production at its 2025 output level into the USD 2,800 price environment of twelve months ago. The company is recovering into the most favourable gold price environment in the decade covered by the production data.

Renco's Recovery Trajectory and What It Means for H2 2026

The 92 kilograms Renco produced in Q1 2026 is described in the operational update as a moderate production that reflects the mine's focus on bringing plant availabilities to plan and stabilising plant throughput and recoveries as the quarter progressed. The mine resumed production in the fourth quarter of 2025 after a period of suspension, producing just 6 kilograms in Q1 2025, and the Q1 2026 figure represents the early stages of the ramp-up toward planned production capacity rather than steady-state output.

The forward focus, confirmed in the outlook, is centred on capacitation of underground operations to ensure stable ore supply and grade control. That description is the language of a mine still building toward nameplate capacity rather than one operating at it.

If Renco's Q1 2026 production of 92 kilograms represents approximately 50% to 60% of its planned quarterly capacity when underground operations are fully capacitated, the full-year Renco contribution at steady state would be in the range of 250 to 350 kilograms annually, comparable to its production levels in the earlier years of the dataset before the group's operational deterioration became systemic.

Added to Cam & Motor's contribution from Q2 onward, the path back toward 500 to 700 kilograms of annual group production is visible in the data, even if achieving 1,000 kilograms or the 2017 peak of 2,071 kilograms requires the exploration and capital investment programme the outlook section references for greenfield and brownfield projects.

Murowa's Diamond Recovery

The diamond segment's Q1 2026 result, 45,606 carats against 2,745 carats in Q1 2025, represents a 1,561% increase in production volume that at first reading looks like the gold sector's recovery trajectory. Renco's production recovery is occurring into a gold price that has risen 70% year-on-year. Murowa's production recovery is occurring into a diamond price environment that the operational update explicitly describes as heavily subdued, a trend which persisted from the comparative prior period.

The diamond market has been structurally challenged since 2023 by a combination of synthetic diamond oversupply, reduced Indian cutting centre demand, and weakened consumer discretionary spending in the key US and European markets. Murowa's 45,606 carats generates revenue at prices that remain insufficient to generate positive cash flows, which is why the update notes that Murowa continues to work on its mining model to enable its mining operations to generate positive cash flows at current price levels.

Volume growth without price support produces higher costs for no additional financial benefit. Murowa's Q1 2026 production recovery is an operational achievement. Its financial contribution to the Group remains constrained by a market condition outside management's control.

The introduction to the operational update identifies the cost of raising funding as relatively high and short-term in nature, making it difficult for businesses to access capital for sustenance and retooling. That characterisation is the honest description of the financing environment that has constrained RioZim's mine rehabilitation programme since at least 2019. The RBZ cut the policy rate from 35% to 30% in June 2026 and reduced the Targeted Finance Facility rate from 20% to 15% with a cap on productive sector on-lending at 25%.

The rate reduction is directionally positive for capital-intensive mining operations that require long-tenure debt to finance multi-year mine development programmes, but the TFF rate of 15% with a 25% on-lending ceiling reflects the constrained state of Zimbabwe's domestic capital market rather than the investment-grade financing conditions that a mine rehabilitation of the scale Cam & Motor requires would access in an international capital market.

The 25% all-inclusive on-lending ceiling is still materially above the single-digit rates at which South African, Australian, and Canadian gold mining companies finance comparable underground development programmes. Zimbabwe's domestic capital market cannot provide the patient, long-duration, competitively priced debt that RioZim's mine restoration requires, and the company has not disclosed a financing structure for the exploration and development programme outlined in the outlook.

The group acknowledged that power deficits continue to pose a significant risk to the growth of the mining industry, which is heavily reliant on consistent power supply, with alternative power sources coming at high cost. The 335 megawatts of new thermal generation capacity commissioned under the government's First 100-Day Cycle, comprising the 235 megawatt Hwange plant and the 100 megawatt Beitbridge plant, are additions to the national grid that improve the aggregate supply position.

Where RioZim Stands Against Its Peers

The production comparison across nine years from 2016 to 2025 documents the distance RioZim must travel to return to relevance among Zimbabwe's listed gold producers. At 2025 production levels, RioZim produced 3.3% of Padenga's output and 3.5% of Caledonia's output. The company that was producing 1.7 times Padenga's output in 2016 has been reduced in nine years to producing one-thirtieth of Padenga's output. That is a description of a company that effectively stopped being a gold producer for several years while continuing to carry the costs, the assets, and the balance sheet obligations of one.

The Q1 2026 data, specifically the 92 kilograms from Renco and the Cam & Motor resumption in Q2, is the first credible evidence in the production record that the trajectory is reversing rather than continuing downward. Renco's 92 kilograms exceeds the entire 2025 annual production. Both mines are now operational for the first time since before the flooding events and operational suspensions that compressed the 2025 output to 84 kilograms. The gold price is 70% higher than a year ago. The company's own outlook confirms that with both Cam & Motor and Renco running at optimal production, it is well poised to recover strongly and return to profitability.

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