For the first time, most of BHP’s earnings came from copper rather than iron ore.
Bell Direct senior market analyst Grady Wulff put a number on the copper shift on this week’s Switzer Show.
“I’d say it could reach $100 per share easily because of its copper exposure,” she said, before adding: “BHP has so strategically shifted its earnings and key driver of earnings to copper. And so, in the most recent results, it was a standout result.”
BHP is currently hovering just north of $60 a share, with its 52-week high currently sitting at just shy of $70 a share.
Her reasoning was the lead time on new supply:
“The thing that differentiates copper from a lot of the commodities is just how long it takes a copper mine to get into production. You discover the asset today, 17-ish years, multi-decades to get into production. In that time we need a lot more copper. You can’t talk AI or electrification without needing copper these days.”
The 17-year figure is from an S&P Global study published back in January 2026, which puts the average at 17 years from discovery to production. The same study forecasts copper demand of 42 million tonnes by 2040, a 50% rise on current levels. BHP is one of the organisations listed as supporting that study.
BHP expects total copper demand to grow from about 34 million tonnes a year now to more than 50 million tonnes by 2050. CFO Vandita Pant gave the figures on the Switzer Show a few weeks ago when we interviewed her at 35 million tonnes rising to 50 million by 2050, and described what she called non-traditional demand, from data centres, electrification and power networks, growing at 6.5% a year. BHP’s own materials put that 6.5% rate over 2020 to 2035 rather than to 2050.
Raymond Chan, head of the Asian desk at Morgans, said on this week’s episode that copper is what makes Australia interesting to overseas investors he’s recently paid a visit to.
“AI in the front end is very digital, but at the back end it is highly physical,” he said. “This is where I guess Australia comes into place in terms of the supply of critical minerals and the infrastructure requirement as well.”
He said the Asia region used to matter to Australia for travel, trade and geopolitics, and now matters for capital allocation, “because Australia fits into the whole ecosystem of AI development”. On why those investors look at BHP specifically, he pointed to Australian copper endowment and BHP’s ownership of it.
Where the copper growth comes from
BHP is targeting compound annual production growth on a copper-equivalent basis of around 3% to 4% a year from FY2027 through to FY2035, and within that, growth in the copper business of around 5% a year.
South Australia carries much of it. Pant told the Switzer Show that its Olympic Dam site recorded its highest production in 20 years, and that Copper South Australia is planned to move from 320 to 500 thousand tonnes of copper in a first phase, with plans to reach 650. The smelter and refinery project at the centre of that programme was, as at 24 August, expected to reach a final investment decision within 18 months.
The by-products come with it. “Copper South Australia is also blessed with lots of by-products. It has a lot of gold, it has a lot of uranium,” Pant said. “So in fact, last year, $2.3 billion of by-product contribution came to Copper South Australia.”
BHP said it would give more detail on the South Australian growth programme before the end of the calendar year, when it takes analysts and investors to Australia.
