The mining and processing project of the Upper Zone of the Cukaru Peki copper and gold mine (formerly referred to as Timok) of Serbia Zijin Mining Doo, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Zijin Mining, has recently obtained the trial production permit for the processing facilities issued by the Serbian Ministry of Mining and Energy, and has entered the trial production stage.

The mining and processing project of the Upper Zone of the Cukaru Peki mine in Serbia is designed to process 3.3 Mt of ore per annum. It is expected that 91,000 t of copper and 2.5 t of gold will be produced per annum after production commences. At present, the construction of the processing facilities of the project has been completed, trial production and operation, construction conclusion and greening, etc are being conducted at full speed. It is planned that all work of the trial production stage will be completed for submission to the Ministry of Mining for acceptance check before September this year. This will achieve a smooth transition from mine infrastructure construction to production and operation.

The Cukaru Peki copper and gold mine in Serbia is a super-large scale copper and gold mine wholly-owned by the company, the project previously referred to as the Timok project. It is divided into the Upper Zone and the Lower Zone. The reserve volumes of resources at the Upper Zone are 1.28 Mt of copper metal grading 3% in average, and 81 t of gold metal grading 1.91 g/t on average. The first mining area will be the super-high grade ore deposit. The resource volumes at the Lower Zone are 14.30 Mt of copper metal grading 0.86% in average and 299 tonnes of gold metal grading 0.18 g/t on average. Zijin formerly held 46% of the Lower Zone mine but bought out the majority stake from Freeport in November 2019.