Minerals Development Oman has awarded a ten-year mining operations management contract worth more than US$416 million for the Mazoon Copper Project to China's Hongda Blasting Engineering Group, acting through its overseas arm Hongda International SPC. The award was announced at the Oman-China Investment Partnership Horizons Forum on November 2.
The contract covers copper ore extraction, waste rock removal, ore handling and transportation to the concentrator plant, together with execution of mining operations to specified technical and safety standards. Mazoon, located in the Wilayat of Yanqul in Al Dhahirah Governorate across a 20-square-kilometre concession, is Oman's largest integrated copper concentrate production project. Five open pits hold 23.4 million tonnes of copper ore reserves, and operations are set to begin in 2027, producing roughly 115,000 tonnes per year of 21.5 percent copper concentrate from 2.5 million tonnes of mined ore. Pre-stripping started in September 2026. Lycopodium holds the EPCM contract, awarded in late 2023 and valued at A$45 million, while Metso signed a US$30 million process equipment order in early 2025 covering Nordberg C130 jaw and HP200e cone crushers, apron feeders, SAG and ball mills, TankCell flotation cells, Concorde Cell units, HRT thickeners, Larox filters and online analysis systems. Hongda, part of Guangdong Handar, says it holds about 100 mining contracts, handling more than 4 billion tonnes of annual open-pit mining and stripping plus 60 million tonnes of underground ore, including the largest contractor position in Pakistan's Thar Coalfield and a major services role for Zijin Mining.
The layered structure of Mazoon's supply chain is what makes this award worth watching. A Chinese mining contractor now sits at the top of the operations stack, but the plant itself rests on an Australian EPCM firm in Lycopodium and Finnish process technology from Metso - a reminder that Gulf mineral projects continue to draw equipment and engineering from Western OEMs even as Chinese contractors win the operations packages. For valve, pump and instrumentation suppliers, a five-pit concentrator processing 2.5 million tonnes of ore per year into 21.5 percent concentrate implies steady demand across crushing, grinding, flotation, thickening and filtration circuits, much of it already placed but leaving a decade of wear parts, aftermarket services and control-system upgrades in play. The ten-year operations management model also shifts performance risk squarely onto the contractor, aligning Hongda's incentives with throughput and recovery rather than metered work - a structure more EPC and O&M firms are likely to encounter as Gulf states such as Oman, Saudi Arabia and the UAE push to convert geology into operating mines. For Chinese contractors, Mazoon is a further beachhead in the Middle East beyond coal and base metals services, and its delivery record between now and the 2027 startup will shape who gets invited to bid on the next wave of Omani mining tenders.