The Democratic Republic of Congo has spent the past decade tightening its grip on how its cobalt and copper leave the country. What changed in the first two weeks of August 2026 is the pace. Three regulatory moves — a concentrate export ban, a new by-product tax regime, and the clearest public statement yet on quota policy — landed almost on top of each other, and together they sharpen the picture of where Kinshasa’s mineral strategy is headed.
The Ban That Was Signed in June and Surfaced in August
A government order dated 29 June 2026, and only made public when Reuters reviewed it on 6 August, bans the export of copper and cobalt concentrates from the DRC with immediate effect. The order is signed by Mines Minister Louis Kabamba Watum, Foreign Trade Minister Julien Paluku Kahongya and Economy Minister Daniel Mukoko Samba, and it explicitly targets unprocessed concentrate rather than the refined metal that makes up the bulk of the country’s actual exports. The mines minister retains discretion to grant one-year waivers in cases judged strategically important. Alongside the ban, the government introduced a new tax regime for economically significant mining by-products, with a three-month transition period before it takes full effect.
The practical exposure is narrower than the headline suggests. In the first quarter of 2026, the DRC exported roughly 696,725 tonnes of refined copper cathode against just 53,926 tonnes of concentrate — most major operators already smelt or refine domestically. But the Kamoa-Kakula complex, jointly owned by Ivanhoe Mines, Zijin Mining and the Congolese state, has been exporting a portion of its concentrate under long-standing derogations while its on-site smelter and the Lualaba Copper Smelter in Kolwezi ramp up capacity. Those exemptions are now the thing to watch. Ivanhoe Mines has publicly clarified that unbeneficiated concentrate exports have technically been restricted in the DRC for close to ten years, with multiple derogations issued to Kamoa-Kakula since production began in 2021 — but a blanket order removes the ambiguity those derogations previously relied on.
The Quota Question Regulators Just Answered — Sort Of
Separately, the DRC’s 2026-2027 cobalt export quota, set at 96,600 tonnes and administered by state regulator ARECOMS, has been running well below its ceiling — market participants estimate actual shipments have filled less than half of allocated volumes in some recent quarters due to logistics bottlenecks and paperwork delays, and ARECOMS scrapped roughly 15,000–20,000 tonnes of unshipped second-quarter 2026 allowance outright in late June.
On 11 August, ARECOMS chairman Patrick Mpoyi Luabeya told Fastmarkets directly that the regulator is not currently planning to change quota volumes, but that a reduction remains on the table if the imbalance between cobalt supply and demand deepens. Producers including China’s Jinchuan and MMG are meanwhile pushing for higher allocations at their DRC operations. Cobalt hydroxide was pricing at $22–23 per lb in mid-August, down from $26–26.25 in April but still roughly four times its level immediately before the original 2025 export ban — evidence that the quota system has succeeded in tightening supply, even as it leaves regulators reluctant to loosen it further.
What This Means for Companies Operating in the DRC
First, any offtake or trading relationship built around DRC concentrate exports needs an active waiver strategy, not a passive one. The mines minister’s discretion to grant one-year strategic exemptions makes this a relationship-management issue as much as a compliance one — Trafigura and other major offtakers with derogation-dependent supply chains should be treating renewal timing as a live commercial risk.
Second, the new by-product tax regime, even with its three-month transition window, adds a cost line that wasn’t in most 2026 operating budgets. Companies with cobalt or copper by-product streams should be modelling the tax impact now rather than after the transition period closes.
Third, the quota system’s direction of travel is unmistakably tighter, not looser, even with prices already elevated. That has direct implications for supply-chain diversification efforts such as the direct US-DRC cobalt supply chain MOU between EGC, EVelution Energy and Trafigura — any structure built to move DRC cobalt to Western buyers now has to be built around a regulator that has explicitly reserved the right to tighten rather than relax volumes.
Kinshasa’s message across all three moves is consistent: value capture stays onshore, exemptions stay discretionary, and the burden of proof for continued market access now sits with the exporter. Companies that treat the concentrate ban and the quota statement as two separate stories are missing the point — they are the same regulatory posture, applied to two different chokepoints in the same supply chain.