Harare- President Emmerson Mnangagwa has told an industrialisation conference last week that Zimbabwe would rather leave its minerals in the ground than export them unprocessed, declaring the era of what he called horse and rider investment relationships over. The statement formalises a policy the government has been building for four years and accelerated in February 2026, when the Ministry of Mines suspended all exports of raw ores and mineral concentrates, lithium included, nearly a year ahead of a deadline that had been set for January 2027.

The country has reached the second and third rungs of a ladder with seven rungs. Mineral value runs from ore, to concentrate, to an intermediate salt or matte, to a refined carbonate or metal, to a battery-grade or alloy product, to a component, to a finished good. Zimbabwe exported ore until 2022 and concentrate until this year.

It now produces lithium sulphate and platinum group metal matte, both intermediates. The margin that the president wants to retain sits three and four rungs higher, in the refining and manufacturing that still take place in China and South Africa, and the capacity to climb those rungs is being imported, not built at home.

Lithium is the test case, and the July data stated the position precisely. Zimbabwe’s lithium sector earned US$746 million in the first half of 2026, of which US$672.8 million came from raw spodumene concentrate and US$73.2 million from lithium sulphate produced at the Arcadia plant near Goromonzi.

Beneficiated product is 9.8 was of sector revenue. Concentrate out-earned the intermediate 9.2 times, and it did so on volume, since the mass of rock shipped as concentrate dwarfed what the single sulphate plant can absorb. The Arcadia facility, a US$400 million investment by China’s Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, runs at about 60% of its 50,000 tonne annual capacity, roughly 30,000 tonnes.

Four sulphate plants are due on line by late 2026. Bikita Minerals, operated by Sinomine, and Kamativi are each building lines costed near US$500 million and targeted for September, and Sinomine has separately described a 100,000 tonne plant that would be the largest in Africa. Sabi Star has agreed to toll its material through domestic capacity in place of a raw export. Industry has committed about US$1.45 billion to lithium beneficiation, and Arcadia expects to add a lithium carbonate plant, one rung higher than sulphate, by the end of 2026.

On plant and capital the strategy is delivering.

However, on ownership it is delivering something more complicated. Every one of those plants is Chinese-owned, built by the same converters that buy the output. Huayou, Sinomine, Chengxin, Yahua and Tsingshan already dominate the mining, and they are now building the processing.

The technology the president says Zimbabwe must wait for is arriving, embedded in the balance sheets of the firms that will own the refined product, set its grade, choose its buyer and book the conversion margin. The 2,000 direct jobs at Arcadia are the domestic gain that is certain, but the process intellectual property and the downstream market are not moving to Zimbabwe with the plant.

Platinum shows the same structure at larger scale and with less urgency applied. Zimbabwe holds the world’s third-largest platinum group metal reserves, about 32 million ounces in the Great Dyke, and matte sales reached US$1.5 billion in 2025, a rise of 71% driven by a 26% lift in the basket price and higher volumes. Platinum output is forecast to reach 518,000 ounces in 2026, and PGM export revenue is projected at US$2 billion in 2027. Every ounce of it leaves the country as converter matte, a smelted intermediate that is shipped to South Africa for the base metal and precious metal refining that isolates the individual platinum, palladium and rhodium.

The refining gap on platinum is narrower than the rhetoric admits and wider than the investment shows. Zimplats has spent US$36 million of a US$190 million base metal refinery revival at Selous, 18.9%, targeted for commissioning early in its 2027 financial year, and has tripled smelting capacity to 380,000 tonnes of concentrate a year. The company stated that once the base metal refinery runs it will move toward a precious metal refinery, the rung that would let Zimbabwe sell finished platinum.

Government imposed a 5% levy on unbeneficiated platinum in January 2025, and unlike lithium the PGM producers have been given no export ban and no ultimatum.

Chrome and steel are the parts of the story where the value chain has actually closed, and they deserve more attention than they receive. Zimbabwe holds 12 to 13% of global chrome reserves, the second-largest endowment, and ferrochrome exports reached 433,293 tonnes in 2025, up 19%, from 17 smelters. The Manhize steel plant built by Dinson, a unit of Tsingshan, reached about 60% of a 600,000 tonne first phase and moved the country from importing roughly 90% of its steel to exporting it.

Steel exports rose from 413 tonnes in 2024 to more than 140,000 tonnes in the first half of 2026, and the plant is credited with displacing up to US$500 million a year of imports. Chrome is where a domestic buyer for a domestic mineral has been demonstrated to work.

Gold sits outside the beneficiation debate for a reason worth stating. Gold is refined domestically through Fidelity and exported as bullion, which is already a high-value form, so the value capture question that dominates lithium and platinum does not apply in the same way. The gold problem is leakage, the smuggling of unrefined gold across borders before it reaches Fidelity, and that puts it in the category of enforcement and pricing, outside the processing question entirely.

Diamonds carry the beneficiation question in full, since cutting and polishing add the value and both largely happen offshore, and the sector has the added difficulty of a production base that has fallen well short of its targets.

The risk gap runs in one direction across all of these minerals. The February ban removed the raw export option before the processing capacity to replace it was in place, which converts every month of delay into lost revenue, not the deferred kind. Lithium concentrate that cannot ship and cannot yet be fully processed domestically is stranded value. The capacity being built to absorb it is foreign-owned, so the margin it captures is retained by the processor and not by the country, and the risk is that Zimbabwe swaps a low price for its raw material against a processing fee on someone else’s plant, and calls the difference beneficiation.

The deeper risk is policy credibility. The lithium deadline was moved forward once, and an investor deciding whether to fund the fifth rung of the ladder prices that reversal into the cost of capital.

Power and infrastructure sit underneath the whole strategy as the binding physical constraint. Refining is energy-intensive, and the sulphate and matte plants, the ferrochrome smelters running below half capacity, and the precious metal refinery that does not yet exist all compete for a grid that cannot meet current demand. The Manhize project includes its own 1,200 megawatt power complex for exactly this reason, and the ferrochrome smelter utilisation figure, below 50%, is in large part a power issue rather than a demand one. Hence, value addition that the grid cannot power is a policy on paper.

Closing the gap is a sequencing problem more than an ambition problem, and the chrome result shows the sequence. Manhize works because a domestic buyer, Dinson, was built alongside the ore, so the mineral has somewhere to go. The lithium and platinum equivalents are the carbonate and hydroxide plants and the precious metal refinery, and the lever that pulls them into existence is the same one Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube has already named for lithium, the tolling agreement, under which a miner without its own plant processes through one that has capacity.

Applied to platinum, a tolling obligation and a dated precious metal refinery requirement would do for PGMs what the ban did for lithium.

The second lever is equity. The retained share of the margin moves when the ownership moves, which puts local shareholding thresholds, joint venture terms and the financing mix ahead of the count of plants commissioned.

The third is power, without which the first two are inert.

The president’s formulation, that the minerals are better left in the ground until the country can extract full value, is defensible as a statement of intent and incomplete as a description of the present. The minerals are not staying in the ground, they are coming out at record volumes and leaving at the second and third rungs of the value ladder, into processing capacity that Zimbabwe increasingly hosts and does not own.

Therefore, whether that becomes value capture or merely value relocation depends on the three levers, and on whether the policy that accelerated the ban is matched by the power, the ownership terms and the refining deadlines that would let the strategy reach the rungs where the money actually sits.

Watchpoints

First is the Arcadia lithium carbonate plant, which is 90% complete and due for commissioning in August. This represents the initial move to Rung 4 and will determine whether the beneficiation trajectory is sustained.

Second are the Bikita and Kamativi lithium sulphate lines, with a September target. Delays would result in banned concentrate remaining stranded through the fourth quarter.

Third is the proposed requirement for PGM producers to establish a precious metals refinery, either through a set deadline or tolling obligations. This remains a stated intention with no timeline, but would extend the lithium beneficiation framework to platinum.

Fourth is grid power allocation to ferrochrome smelters, many of which are operating below half capacity. Without adequate power supply, beneficiation policy alone cannot drive results.

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