A privately held mining group that operates everything it owns.

What we do

Quintel finds, builds and operates mines. We produce copper and cobalt in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, gold in Ghana, manganese in South Africa and Gabon, and bauxite in Guinea. A seventh mine is in development in Côte d’Ivoire and a greenfield copper search is under way in Namibia.

We are an operator, not an investor. Every asset in the portfolio is managed by Quintel, and the group holds no non-operated minority interests. That is a deliberate constraint: it limits how fast we can grow, and it means that when something goes wrong at one of our mines there is nobody else to point at.

The business is deliberately concentrated in Africa. The group has no operations elsewhere and no plans to acquire any. Thirty years of relationships, licences, workforce and institutional knowledge on one continent is worth more than a scattered portfolio that nobody in head office fully understands.

How we are owned, and why it matters

Quintel is privately held. Approximately 46% of the company is owned by the two founding families, 22% by current and former management and by employee share trusts at three operations, and the remaining 32% by long-term institutional partners whose holdings carry no redemption rights before 2032.

There is no listed equity, no public debt and no quarterly earnings call. This is not presented as a virtue in itself. Private ownership removes a set of short-term pressures and replaces them with a different risk: less external scrutiny. The group’s answer to that risk is to disclose voluntarily what a listed peer would be required to disclose, and to submit the material claims to independent assurance.

The group’s financial policy limits net debt to 1.5 times EBITDA through the cycle. That limit was written in 2012, tested in 2015 when copper fell below US$2.00 a pound, and has never been relaxed. At the end of FY2025 net debt stood at 0.71 times EBITDA.

The group in one table

All figures relate to FY2025, the year ended 31 December 2025, unless stated otherwise.

Legal name

Quintel Corporation Limited

Founded

1996, in London

Ownership

Private: founding families, management and employee trusts, long-term institutional partners

Head office

London, with operational headquarters in Johannesburg

Operating mines

7 across 9 countries

Development projects

2: Bagoé (gold, Côte d’Ivoire) and Erongo (copper exploration, Namibia)

Commodities

Copper, gold, manganese, bauxite and cobalt as a by-product

People

6,400 employees and 3,100 contractors

Revenue

US$2.94bn

EBITDA

US$1.02bn at a 34.7% margin

Net debt to EBITDA

0.71x, against a policy limit of 1.5x

Average reserve life

17 years, weighted by contained metal value

The operating model

Head office is small by design: 84 people in London and Johannesburg combined, supporting 9,500 across the group. Corporate functions own standards, assurance and capital allocation. Operations own delivery. A general manager at a Quintel mine has genuine authority over how the mine is run and genuine accountability for the result.

Four things are non-negotiable and cannot be varied at site level: the fatal risk and critical control standards, the tailings governance framework including the Engineer of Record structure, the anti-bribery and corruption programme, and the mineral resource and ore reserve estimation governance. Everything else is a conversation.

The group runs a single operations review each month at which every high-potential incident across all seven mines is examined individually, chaired by the Chief Operating Officer and attended by every general manager. It is the most valuable meeting in the company and the only one nobody is permitted to send a deputy to.

Standards and memberships

Voluntary frameworks are only worth the auditing behind them. These are the ones we have committed to and are assessed against.

• International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) — mining principles applied on a voluntary basis
• Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) — supporting company in all host countries
• Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management (GISTM) — full conformance programme
• Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA) — independent assessment pathway
• Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights
• United Nations Global Compact — participant since 2009
• ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and ISO 50001 certified management systems
• Responsible Minerals Initiative — downstream assurance for cobalt and copper

What we are not

We do not trade third-party material. Every tonne Quintel sells came out of a Quintel mine, which is the simplest possible answer to a whole category of supply chain questions.

We do not operate in jurisdictions under comprehensive international sanctions, and we do not hold interests through structures whose beneficial ownership we cannot state on request.

We are not a battery materials company, an energy transition company or a technology company, whatever the commodity cycle currently rewards. We are a mining company that happens to produce three metals the energy transition needs, and one — bauxite — that it mostly does not.