Foreign Investors Visiting Mining Opportunities Exhibition in Tehran

Tehran is hosting the Minex 2019 which is one of the largest of its kind in mines and mining industries in the Middles East. 

The three-day event presents the latest technologies and equipment, services, machineries for mines and mining industries in exploration, excavation, processing, production and export.

Representatives from Canada, South Africa, Japan, China, Pakistan, South Korea, India, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany are attending this year’s event.

The annual event also aims to introduce investment opportunities in Iran for mining companies worldwide. Minex is organized by the Ministry of Industries, Mining and Trade, in cooperation with several other organizations.

Iran is home to 68 types of minerals with more than 37 billion tons of proven reserves and 57 billion tons of potential reserves. According to the United States Geological Survey, Iran is home to more than 7% of the world’s mineral reserves. 

Last month, the Iranian Mines and Mining Industries Development and Renovation (IMIDRO) announced that the country is going to increase investment in the mining sector, recounting that 150 mines will be re-activated in a bid to boost Tehran’s economic growth in the face of the US unilateral sanctions.

An IMIDRO official, Somayyeh Kholousi, said on September 22 that plans were in place to revive operations in some 150 closed mines across Iran in the upcoming months, adding that the projects would lead to permanent employment for around 3,000 workers.

Iran is planning to employ an extra 10,000 people in the mining industry in projects worth nearly $3.9b until the end of the current Persian calendar year in March, she added.

Kholousi said the South Aluminum Project, planned to be opened in November in Fars province, would seek to compensate for the reduced exports of aluminum from Iran over the past years.

The official said the massive expansion of the mining sector in Iran would lead to an increase in the production of steel of up to 39 million tons a year while it would also increase aluminum production by three times.

Kholousi said a main goal of the expansion project is to increase the output for key products like copper cathode and graphite electrodes. She said Iran would import 50 percent less of graphite electrodes, a product widely used in the steel industry, next year.

She said the share of the net private investment in Iran’s mining industry had increased over the past 18 months to reach nearly $140 million.

Iran, a country highly rich in minerals and metal reserves, has sought to use the potential to offset the impacts of a series of American sanctions imposed on its oil industry.

Kholousi said the total investment expected to be injected to the mining sector in Iran until March 2022, when a current national development plan concludes, would top $16 billion.

Earlier in September, the IMIDRO announced that the country exported 633,050 tons of steel in the last local calendar month (between July 23 and August 22) which shows a 37% jump in comparison with figures from corresponding period in the last year.

Late in August, the Iranian Ministry of Industry, Mine and Trade said that the country produced some 7.2 million tons of steel products in the first 4 months of the current local calendar year (March 21-July 21) indicating an 11.6% growth compared with the output of the same period last year.