Zimbabwe banned antimony exports to keep the value at home. Lithium shows where it went instead.

Zimbabwe has stopped antimony and tungsten exports in all forms with a letter to its state mineral marketer. The ban moves almost no ore. What it puts in play is who will own the conversion step.

Harare has run this experiment before, with lithium. So far it has produced one operating processing plant in Zimbabwe, Chinese-owned, with two more under construction, also Chinese.

On 21 July 2026 Dr Thomas Utete Wushe, Secretary for Mines and Mining Development, wrote to Dr N.J. Moyo, General Manager of the Minerals Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe (MMCZ). The letter directed MMCZ to suspend “with immediate effect and until further notice, the export of antimony and tungsten in all forms, including ores and concentrates”. MMCZ markets every Zimbabwean mineral other than gold and silver, so the instruction closes the trade at its only legal exit. The stated rationale is in-country value addition and beneficiation.

The letter stayed out of view for seven weeks. Mining Zimbabwe reported it in early September, and on 8 September Bloomberg reported that it had seen the letter and that the Ministry of Mines had confirmed it. Shanghai Metals Market described the ban the same day as effective 8 September, which reads as the date of the reports rather than of the directive. Every account that cites the letter dates it 21 July.

For a buyer holding a contract for Zimbabwean stibnite concentrate, what matters is what the letter leaves out. None of the reports cites a statutory instrument or general notice giving the suspension legal form. None cites a customs code, such as heading 2617.10 for antimony ores, so the scope is set by the words “in all forms” rather than by a defined list of goods. No exemptions are reported, and no licensing route, which is the usual way a state turns a prohibition into a controlled channel. The reports are silent on stockpiles, existing contracts and goods already in transit, and the letter runs “until further notice”, with no expiry or review date reported.

The letter follows a precedent set earlier in the year. On 25 February 2026 the Ministry of Mines suspended exports of all raw minerals and lithium concentrates, citing malpractices in the export process. In May the ministry classified antimony and tungsten as critical minerals. The July letter is the first measure reported to name either metal.

On volume, the suspension barely registers. Chinese customs data reported by Shanghai Metals Market show China imported 64,748 tonnes of antimony ore and concentrate from January to July 2026, of which 54 tonnes came from Zimbabwe, under 0.1 per cent. Of 19,520 tonnes of tungsten ore and concentrate imported over the same months, 157 tonnes were Zimbabwean, about 0.8 per cent. United Nations Comtrade data for 2023, the most recent year with a published breakdown by destination, show 86.4 per cent of Zimbabwe’s antimony ore exports going to China, with the rest to Mozambique. This is jurisdictional overreliance, and it runs one way. China is the buyer for almost all of Zimbabwe’s antimony ore; Zimbabwe supplies less than one thousandth of the ore China imports.

Chinese imports of antimony ore did fall in August, from 5,400.89 tonnes in July to 4,384.13 tonnes, a drop of 18.8 per cent. Zimbabwe cannot account for it. At its January to July rate of under 8 tonnes a month, a complete halt would explain less than 1 per cent of the fall. This is a policy signal, not a supply event.

Nor is there anywhere domestically for the material to go. No domestic antimony or tungsten smelter has yet been named. Zimbabwe’s antimony is mined alongside gold in the Midlands greenstone belt; 137 mines in the Kwekwe district alone have produced 4,500 tonnes of stibnite concentrate. Most of the country’s antimony concentrate has been stockpiled while downstream processing facilities are put in place, and only the exploration and mining stages of the value chain are fully developed, WeMine Zimbabwe reported.

Zimbabwean antimony enters the market as a civilian commodity; where it ends up after smelting in China is not on the record. It has no defence qualification pathway on record. Chinese exports of dual-use items to United States military end-users or for military end use are prohibited under Article 1 of the Ministry of Commerce’s Announcement 2024 No. 46, in force since 3 December 2024 with no expiry. Article 2 of the same announcement, the general ban on antimony exports to the United States, is suspended under Announcement 2025 No. 72 until 27 November 2026. The wider US–China trade truce has since been extended to 10 January 2027, but no Chinese notice extending that suspension has been reported.

Zimbabwe has already tested this approach on a mineral that matters far more to its export earnings. The February suspension cut off lithium concentrate, of which Zimbabwe shipped 1.128 million tonnes in 2025. By 2 April the ministry had set conditions for a restart in a letter to the Chamber of Mines: export quotas for each producer, written commitments to build lithium sulphate plants before 1 January 2027, and a 10 per cent export tax on concentrate until a full ban on concentrate shipments takes effect that month. Shipments resumed under quota. Sinomine Resource Group’s 2026 allocation for its Bikita mine has since reached 500,000 tonnes.

The processing has come, and every part of it is Chinese, but it answers a policy that began long before February: a ban on raw lithium ore exports in late 2022, and a deadline to end concentrate exports from January 2027. Prospect Lithium Zimbabwe, owned by Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, completed a $400m lithium sulphate plant at Arcadia and in April 2026 shipped what it called the first lithium salt produced in Africa. It remains the only lithium sulphate plant operating in the country. Sinomine is building a 100,000 tonne a year plant at Bikita, due for completion in mid-2027, and Sichuan Yahua is building one at its Kamativi mine.

Lithium policy brought processing into Zimbabwe. It did not create a Zimbabwean processing industry. For now, it has created a Chinese one inside Zimbabwe.

Sandawana is structured differently. Owned by the state, it is to be built and run by Huayou and Tsingshan Holding Group, which take no equity: they recover the loan that finances the project and then hand it back. In effect, the state trades operational control for infrastructure now and recovers both later. Once the loan is repaid, and no sooner than five years after the plant starts running, Zimbabwe owns the plant and controls its operation. Whether that is the best route to adding value at home is for Zimbabweans to decide, and part of that judgement rests on what the interim delivers locally, including how many jobs the project creates for the surrounding community before ownership reverts.

Applied to antimony and tungsten, the lithium outcome turns the strategic logic of the ban around. Zimbabwean concentrate already went almost entirely to China. A suspension framed as sovereignty does not add a tonne to supply outside China. If the conversion capacity it calls for is financed the way lithium’s was, it moves part of the Chinese midstream onto African soil and guarantees that midstream its feedstock.

Harare appears to see the risk. At the Africa Down Under conference in Perth in early September, Deputy Minister of Mines and Mining Development Dr Caleb Makwiranzou pitched smelting and refining opportunities to Australian investors, naming antimony and tungsten among the minerals seeking investment. Investors with patient capital, he said, were welcome. No antimony or tungsten processing deal has been announced since.

Of the four lithium plants built or planned, Sandawana is the only one structured to pass into Zimbabwean ownership. Arcadia, Bikita and Kamativi will process in Zimbabwe for as long as their owners choose to; Sandawana is designed to come home. That gives it a long-term strategic value the others lack, and nothing in the model requires the partner to be Chinese. It is transactional by design: a foreign partner supplies the capital and expertise, earns its return over a fixed period, and leaves an asset behind. Applied to antimony or tungsten, in Zimbabwe or among the other African producers pressing for more processing at home, it offers governments seeking supply outside China a way to fund the downstream processing capacity a host country wants and will eventually own, with value created on both sides. Harare’s pitch in Perth was an invitation of exactly that kind. Whether capital from outside China answers it will show whether those governments’ commitment to diversifying supply away from China is a policy or a slogan.

Two indicators will show where this leads: whether Zimbabwe names a partner for an antimony or tungsten plant, and whose money is behind it; and the Chinese customs prints by country of origin from August onwards, the first full month after the letter took effect. Ore is getting easier to find outside China. Conversion is not, and the terms on which it is financed will decide whom it serves.