Glencore

Phase A — Understand the business

Lens 1 · Company Overview

Glencore is two businesses bolted together, and the bolt is the whole point. It is (1) one of the world's largest diversified miners — copper, cobalt, zinc, nickel, ferroalloys, plus the largest seaborne thermal-coal exporter and, since 2024, a top-tier steelmaking-coal producer — and (2) one of the "Big Five" physical-commodity traders (alongside Vitol, Trafigura, Mercuria, Gunvor), running 24/7 marketing desks in metals, energy and logistics. The integrated model "links assets to trading desks to capture margin across quality, time and location" — i.e. it monetises information and optionality on top of tonnes.

Scale (FY2025). Revenue $247.5bn (+7% YoY), Group Adjusted EBITDA $13.5bn (−6%), of which Industrial $9.9bn and Marketing Adjusted EBIT $2.9bn. Market cap ~$67–87bn depending on source/listing line (GLEN.L ~574p).

Products / volumes (own-sourced, FY2025):

• Copper 851.6 kt (−11%)
• Cobalt 36.1 kt (−5%) — ~20% of global mined supply
• Zinc 969.4 kt (+7%)
• Nickel 71.9 kt (−7%)
• Energy (thermal) coal 98 Mt (−2%)
• Steelmaking coal ~20 Mt (up from ~7.5 Mt pre-EVR)

Customers / counterparties. No single >10% customer is disclosed; the marketing book sells physical commodities to smelters, refiners, utilities, OEMs and other traders worldwide. Oil marketing ran ~1.2 mbpd in 2024. The customer base is the global commodity complex itself, which is both a diversification strength and the reason the marketing P&L is opaque.

Contract structure. A blend: long-term offtake on industrial assets; spot + term physical trades, blending and arbitrage in marketing; logistics and financing margins layered on top. Marketing earnings are fee-like and through-cycle by design — management guides them to a band rather than a point (see Lens 4/7).

Lens 2 · Supply Chain

Glencore is a supply chain — it owns links from mine to delivered cargo. Mapping upstream → company → end-customer with named nodes:

Upstream inputs / assets (own mines):

• Copper: Collahuasi (44% JV with Anglo American + Mitsui) and Antamina (Peru, JV with BHP/Teck/Mitsubishi) — the two swing assets that drove the 2025 miss; KCC and Mutanda (DRC, copper-cobalt); Antapaccay (Peru); Lomas Bayas (Chile); Mt Isa complex (Australia, MICO mine closed mid-2025). Growth pipeline: El Pachón and Agua Rica/MARA (Argentina), NewRange (ex-PolyMet/NorthMet, US).
• Cobalt: by-product of DRC copper (KCC, Mutanda). The DRC supplies ~70% of global cobalt; Glencore is the largest Western-aligned producer.
• Coal: Australian thermal + Cerrejón (Colombia, voluntarily curtailed 5–10 Mt); South African thermal; EVR / Elk Valley (Canada steelmaking coal, 77% Glencore-operated).
• Zinc/nickel: McArthur River, Mt Isa (zinc); Antamina by-product; INO (Integrated Nickel Ops, Canada) + Murrin Murrin (Australia).

Midstream — the marketing/trading layer (the moat node): smelting, blending, storage, freight chartering, and the global desks that take physical title and arbitrage location/quality/time. This is the link pure-play miners don't own.

Downstream — named buyer archetypes: copper → smelters and wire-rod/cathode buyers; cobalt → battery-precursor makers and CMOC/CATL-adjacent battery chain; coal → Asian utilities (thermal) and steelmakers (met coal — note Nippon Steel holds 20% and POSCO 3% of EVR, making two of the world's largest steelmakers both partners and customers); zinc → galvanisers; oil → refiners and utilities.

Chokepoints / single-source dependencies:

1. DRC concentration for cobalt and a slug of copper — political, ESG and now legal risk (the 2022 DRC corruption settlement) sit on the highest-margin barrels.
2. Collahuasi — a jointly-owned asset Glencore doesn't fully control, yet it caused the 2026 copper downgrade (−68.1 kt of the FY2025 shortfall). Operational fate partly in Anglo's hands.
3. Smelting economics — Glencore shut several custom copper/zinc smelters and SA ferrochrome smelters in 2025 where margins went negative — treatment/refining charges (TC/RCs) collapsing is a structural headwind for the smelting node.

Names present, chokepoints marked — this lens is grounded, not generic.

Lens 3 · Competitive Advantages (moats)

The real moat is the marketing book, not the mines. Anyone with capital can buy a copper mine; almost no one can replicate a 60-year-old physical-trading franchise with global desks, financing relationships, storage and freight optionality, and the information that flows from being the counterparty to half the market. The marketing division "lowers corporate break-evens and smooths earnings versus pure-play miners" and is guided through-cycle to $2.3–3.5bn EBIT (raised July 2025 from $2.2–3.2bn after the Viterra/Bunge exit). That fee-like pool is a structural advantage Rio and BHP simply do not have.

Durable moats, ranked:

1. Trading/logistics network (high durability). Scale + relationships + information. Hard to build, harder to buy. Rivals (Vitol, Trafigura) pressure spreads but none combines this with Glencore's owned-asset flow.
2. Cobalt/DRC position (high but fragile). ~20% of mined cobalt and a dominant DRC footprint = real scarcity power in a battery input. Fragile because it's a by-product (volume follows copper, not cobalt price) and because DRC carries political/legal tail risk.
3. Seaborne thermal-coal scale (cash-rich, terminal). Largest exporter; gushes cash in tight markets — but it is a melting ice cube with rising legal/climate friction (the Ulan ruling).
4. Diversification / counter-cyclicality. When mining earnings fall, marketing tends to spike on volatility — a genuine earnings shock-absorber.

Bargaining power. Over customers: strong in cobalt (scarcity) and physical copper (reliability of supply); moderate elsewhere. Over suppliers: as a trader it often is the price-setter; as a miner it's a price-taker on the commodity but a cost-controller on inputs. Net: Glencore needs the market less than most single-commodity peers because it can pivot the book — that optionality is the under-appreciated edge.

Where the moat is weak: smelting/refining (negative-margin, being shut), and the perennial governance discount the market applies for the corruption history and coal exposure.

Lens 4 · Segments

Glencore reports two top-line segments — Industrial (own mining/smelting) and Marketing (trading) — and within Industrial splits Metals & Minerals from Energy Products.

Mining margins (FY2025): metals operations 30%, steelmaking coal 36%, energy coal 19%. The met-coal margin (highest in the group) is the EVR acquisition paying off; energy-coal margin compressed on weaker thermal prices.

Trend and cause:

• Industrial H2 > H1 by 65% ($6.2bn vs $3.7bn EBITDA) — the second-half inflection that defines the 2025 story: copper volumes recovered (H2 +48% vs H1 on grade uplifts at KCC/Antamina/Antapaccay) and met-coal ramped.
• Marketing H2 > H1 by 15% — the trading book did its job, leaning into volatility.
• Geography: revenue is global; the earnings are concentrated where the margin is — DRC/Zambia copper-cobalt, Australian/Canadian coal, Peruvian/Chilean copper. (Segment-by-geography EBITDA not separately sourced in the prelim release → n/a at geography granularity; flagged for Annual Report follow-up.)

The decelerating-headline / accelerating-exit-rate split is the single most important fact in the numbers: 2025 was the trough, and the company exited it running.

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Phase B — Measure performance

Lens 5 · Earnings Result (FY2025, reported 19 Feb 2026)

The latest full-year print:

• Revenue $247.5bn (+7%) — driven by higher copper prices (Cu +44% over the year) and EVR coal volume, despite lower copper tonnes.
• Adjusted EBITDA $13.51bn (−6%) — weaker thermal coal and lower copper volume outweighed price.
• Adjusted EBIT $5.98bn (−14%) — operating leverage works in reverse on lower volumes.
• Net income attributable $363m vs a $1.63bn loss in 2024. Pre-significant items net income was $2.3bn; the gap is impairments — chiefly Cerrejón curtailment and rand strength on the SA coal business. This is why the headline P/E (~287x) is meaningless — earnings are impairment-suppressed, not structurally near-zero (see Lens 7).
• FFO $8.7bn (−17%) — the cash metric that matters; still robustly positive.
• Net capex $6.9bn (vs $6.7bn) — disciplined; the Argentine copper builds are largely future capex.
• Net debt $11.17bn, essentially flat YoY; ND/Adj EBITDA 0.83x. Note: net funding rose $3.0bn to $39.4bn on higher readily-marketable inventory (RMI +12%) as metals prices rose — RMI is liquid and nets against debt, but it's a working-capital tell to watch.
• Shareholder distributions $3.47bn (+83% YoY); 2026 base distribution set at 17c/share (~$2.0bn) = 10c base + 7c top-up.

Beat/miss vs consensus: not cleanly sourced to a consensus line → n/a. The qualitative read: EBITDA roughly in line, the story was the H2 inflection and the capital-returns step-up.

Balance-sheet flags: RMI build (benign but watch), impairments concentrated in coal (the structurally challenged unit, so arguably "good" impairments), leverage comfortable at 0.83x.

Market reaction: the stock has been supported into 2026 by copper near record highs, buybacks, and the listing-review resolution rather than the EBITDA number itself.

Unusual vs own history: the $3.0bn rise in net funding on RMI and the 83% jump in distributions off a down EBITDA year both stand out — management is signalling confidence in the H2 cash inflection by returning more, not less, in a soft year.

Lens 6 · Earnings Calls (sentiment trend)

No transcripts on disk (transcripts=0); read from public summaries. Speakers: CEO Gary Nagle, CFO Steven Kalmin, with Fewings/Wagner on segments.

Tone arc across 2025:

• H1 2025 call (Aug): defensive but forward-leaning. EBITDA −14%, blamed weak coal prices and copper timing. Key tell: "2025 is expected to be the floor for the copper department production volumes" and "expect a stronger H2... deleveraging... net debt reduction by year-end." Management leaned into supply discipline as a virtue — cut Cerrejón 5–10 Mt, shut negative-margin ferrochrome and custom smelters.
• FY2025 call (Feb 2026): vindicated and more confident. H2 delivered the promised inflection (Industrial EBITDA +65% H2/H1). Pivot to a clear copper-growth narrative (1Mt by 2028, 1.6Mt by 2035) and a capital-returns message (distributions +83%).

Recurring phrases: "floor for copper," "supply discipline," "through-the-cycle marketing," "value over volume," "balance-sheet strength."

Things they stopped saying: the coal demerger and the US/NY primary-listing move — both dropped in 2025 (see Lens 8). The narrative deliberately shifted from "portfolio surgery" to "operational delivery + return cash." That is a meaningful, deliberate sentiment shift: management stopped promising structure and started promising execution.

Lens 7 · Comps

Peer set: the diversified-major and base-metals complex. Multiples are LTM and ``-sourced with date; where a clean figure isn't sourced it reads n/a.

Read. On trailing EV/EBITDA, Glencore screens expensive vs Rio/BHP (~11x vs ~7.4–7.8x) — but the comparison is distorted: (a) Glencore's EBITDA is at/near a cyclical trough (copper volumes bottomed in 2025), so the trailing multiple is inflated by depressed denominator; (b) the marketing EBIT pool deserves a higher multiple than mine EBITDA (it's fee-like), so a blended sum-of-the-parts argues Glencore shouldn't trade at a pure-miner multiple; (c) the P/E is genuinely not meaningful given impairments. Forward EV/EBITDA on a copper-recovery year would compress materially. The dividend yield is the weakest line vs Rio's 5.1% — Glencore returns cash more through buybacks/variable top-ups than a fat fixed dividend. Do not anchor on the 287x P/E or the 11x trailing EV/EBITDA in isolation — both are cycle/impairment artefacts.

Lens 8 · Stock-Price Catalysts (last ~5 years)

What actually moves GLEN, from the tape and the news record:

1. Coal prices (2022 super-spike → 2024–25 fade). Coal generated outsized profits in 2022–23; the stock was a coal-cash-flow trade. Weaker thermal in 2024–25 dragged earnings and the multiple. Coal is still the swing factor for cash returns.
2. Copper price + volume. Cu +44% in 2025 and "near record highs" into late 2025/2026 is the bull pillar; the 2026 copper guidance cut (Collahuasi) was a negative catalyst that the market mostly looked through given the long-term ramp story.
3. The 2022 corruption settlement (~$1.5bn). A known, priced overhang; the 2025 SFO charges against ex-executives (Lens 10) reopened headline risk.
4. Listing review (2024–Aug 2025). Speculation about moving the primary listing to NY moved sentiment; the August 2025 decision to stay in London removed an overhang/optionality depending on your view.
5. Coal demerger (proposed → abandoned). The 2024 plan to spin coal into an NYSE-listed entity, then the >95% shareholder vote to retain coal (mid-2025), repriced the equity around capital-allocation expectations.
6. Capital returns. Buyback announcements (e.g. the $1bn programme) and distribution step-ups are reliable positive catalysts.
7. Idiosyncratic legal/ESG: the Ulan coal court ruling (Nov 2025) as a climate-risk data point.

Pattern: the market trades Glencore as coal-cash-flow + copper-optionality + governance-discount + capital-returns, in roughly that order of sensitivity. It reacts more to commodity price and capital-allocation signals than to reported EPS. That tells you the re-rating lever is demonstrated copper-volume growth + sustained buybacks, not a single earnings beat.

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Phase C — Judge people & books

Lens 9 · Management

CEO — Gary Nagle (since July 2021). A career Glencore/coal-and-marketing insider (South African; ran the coal business; deep marketing roots). Archetype: operator-trader, not founder — but culturally a product of the Glasenberg-era trading house.

• Track record: delivered the EVR/Elk Valley acquisition ($6.93bn for 77%, closed Jul 2024) — a bold, well-timed met-coal bet that is now the highest-margin mining unit (36%). Drove the supply-discipline playbook in 2025 (Cerrejón cuts, smelter closures) that protected margins, and the 2025 H2 inflection he pre-committed to on the H1 call actually landed. He walked away from the NY listing and the coal demerger when shareholders pushed back — disciplined, ego-light capital allocation.
• Skin in the game: Glencore is famously employee/management-owned in DNA (Glasenberg and senior traders held large stakes historically). Precise current insider-ownership % n/a (no insider-transactions.csv on disk; not in public summaries). The cultural alignment is real but should be verified against the Annual Report.
• Capital-allocation history: mixed-to-good. Pluses: EVR timing; $3.5bn returned in a down year; buybacks; disciplined net capex at $6.9bn. Watch: the Argentine copper builds ($13.5bn headline across El Pachón + Agua Rica/MARA over a decade) are huge, long-dated and execution-heavy — and Glencore is seeking partners to de-risk them, which is prudent but signals it can't (or won't) fund them alone.
• Red flags: the corporate corruption legacy is the original sin (Nagle inherited it; the conduct predates him), but the 2025 SFO charges against former oil-division leadership keep governance in the headlines. No evidence of current promotional behaviour; if anything the comms are understated.
• CFO — Steven Kalmin (long-tenured, since 2005): a steadying, credible presence; the balance-sheet-strength / through-cycle-marketing framing is his.

Net: a competent, disciplined insider team that under-promises and has lately over-delivered (H2 2025). The question for the next chapter is purely execution on the copper ramp — can they hit 1Mt by 2028 when 2026 guidance already had to be cut on Collahuasi?

Lens 10 · Forensic Red Flags

Acting as a forensic analyst. No SEC filings exist (no CIK), so the usual rev-rec/segment forensics off a 10-K aren't available; the analysis leans on disclosed primary results + the legal record.

Accounting / quality-of-earnings flags:

1. Adjusted vs statutory gap. "Adjusted EBITDA" excludes significant items; FY2025 statutory net income ($363m) is far below pre-significant-items ($2.3bn) due to coal impairments. The adjustments are explicable (genuine impairments), but the habitual reliance on "Adjusted" metrics warrants the standard scepticism — always reconcile to FFO ($8.7bn) and net debt (flat) as the cash truth, which here corroborate a healthier picture than statutory EPS.
2. Marketing P&L opacity. The trading book's $2.9bn EBIT is inherently hard to audit externally — mark-to-market on physical/derivative positions, RMI valuation, and intra-group transfer pricing between Industrial and Marketing. The $3.0bn rise in net funding on a 12% RMI increase is benign-looking (liquid inventory, price-driven) but is exactly the line where a trading house's working capital can mask risk. Watch RMI vs commodity prices each half.
3. By-product cobalt accounting. Cobalt economics ride on copper volumes; revenue-recognition and inventory marks on a volatile, thin cobalt market are a soft spot.
4. Goodwill/intangibles from EVR. A $6.93bn acquisition carries purchase-price-allocation and goodwill that could impair if met-coal prices fall — no impairment yet, but it's now a balance-sheet exposure.

Cash vs earnings: FFO $8.7bn comfortably exceeds statutory net income — cash conversion is not a flag (the opposite — earnings are conservative vs cash). Net debt flat YoY confirms the cash story.

Regulatory findings (required sub-section).

• SEC EDGAR (LR + AAER): none possible — Glencore has no CIK and does not file with the SEC.
• DOJ / SFO / Brazil / DRC (the material record):
• May 2022: Glencore pleaded guilty to FCPA foreign-bribery and (CFTC) market-manipulation conspiracies; total ~$1.5bn in coordinated penalties across US/UK/Brazil — $700m to DOJ, $486m to CFTC, ~$39.6m to Brazil's MPF (Petrobras-linked). Admitted >$100m in bribes across seven countries (Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Brazil, Venezuela, DRC). 3-year independent compliance monitor appointed.
• Dec 2022: $180m settlement with the DRC for corruption 2007–2018.
• November 2025 (live): the UK SFO charged six former Glencore employees — including Alex Beard (ex-head of the oil division) — with conspiracy to make corrupt payments for West-African oil contracts (2007–2014), plus falsifying documents. Four pleaded not guilty at Southwark Crown Court (Nov 2025); trial listed for 4 October 2027. This is individual prosecution (the corporate matter was resolved in 2022) but keeps the brand and headline risk live for two more years.
• Item 3 (Legal Proceedings): Glencore files no 10-K → use the Annual Report's litigation note instead; not separately sourced here → n/a (chase the FY2025 Annual Report PDF).
• Climate/coal legal: the Ulan coal ruling (Australia, Nov 2025) flagged as a rising legal/climate-approval risk on thermal coal.

Forensic verdict: the accounting is not the scare — cash backs the earnings. The governance/legal record is the scare, and it is partly structural (DRC, coal, a trading culture). The 2022 resolution is priced; the 2027 SFO trial is a slow-burn headline risk, not (post-2022) a balance-sheet-impairing one.

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Phase D — Project & stress-test

Lens 11 · Forward Projection

Glencore reports EPS in USD cents; with ~12.0bn shares, EBITDA is the cleaner anchor than EPS. I project Adjusted EBITDA (the metric management and the market use) for FY2026–FY2028, bottom-up from FY2025 actuals + guidance. No forecast.ts logged (per --watchlist rule). All outputs `` with arithmetic.

Base inputs:

• Copper: 851.6 kt (2025) → guidance 810–870 kt (2026, mid 840) → recovery to ~930 kt (2027, mgmt) → ~1,000 kt (2028 target).
• Coal: thermal ~95–100 Mt; met coal ~20 Mt (EVR full-year). Earnings highly price-sensitive.
• Marketing: through-cycle EBIT $2.3–3.5bn; base $2.9bn (2025 actual, mid-band).

Scenarios (Adjusted EBITDA, USD):

Arithmetic for Base FY2027: 2025 EBITDA $13.5bn at trough copper volume (851kt) → add ~80kt copper @ $5/lb incremental margin ($0.6–0.8bn), restore coal/zinc, marketing flat $2.9bn, met-coal full contribution → ~$16bn. The whole thesis is that EBITDA rises on volume recovery even at flat prices — 2025 was the denominator trough.

EPS: statutory EPS is impairment-distorted; underlying EPS scales with EBITDA less ~$6.9bn capex, ~financing, ~tax. A clean consensus EPS line is n/a — do not fabricate one. The honest forward statement: FFO of $8–11bn across the base case funds both the Argentine copper capex and a rising buyback — that self-funding is the investable point.

Lens 12 · Bull vs Bear

Bull case. Glencore is a copper-and-cobalt growth story trading at a coal-and-governance discount. 2025 was the copper-volume floor; the ramp to 1Mt (2028) / 1.6Mt (2035) lands Glencore as a top-tier copper major into a structural copper deficit — and it gets there partly through owned, permitted brownfield growth (KCC, Antapaccay, Collahuasi recovery) plus the optionality of El Pachón/MARA. Layered on top: a fee-like marketing book guided to $2.3–3.5bn EBIT that the market under-multiples; a coal cash-cow that >95% of shareholders chose to keep precisely because it funds buybacks; and a management team that returned $3.5bn in a down year and has shown it will shrink the share count. Earnings surprise to the upside come from (a) copper volume × price both rising, (b) marketing volatility windfalls, (c) buyback-driven per-share compounding. Catalyst-rich and self-funding.

Bear case (2–3 permanent-impairment risks).

1. Copper-ramp execution failure. They already cut 2026 guidance on Collahuasi — a JV they don't fully control. If 1Mt-by-2028 slips repeatedly, the entire re-rating thesis (which rests on volume, since price is exogenous) evaporates and the stock stays a coal-cash-flow trade at a 7x multiple.
2. Coal terminal-decline + legal/climate impairment. Thermal coal is a melting ice cube; the Ulan ruling shows courts will scrutinise approvals. A faster-than-expected thermal price/volume decline plus impairments could strand capital and re-widen the ESG discount — the very discount that made the demerger tempting.
3. Governance/legal tail. The 2027 SFO trial, residual DRC exposure, and the structural opacity of a trading house mean a permanent governance discount and non-zero risk of a fresh enforcement surprise.

Pre-mortem (18 months out, thesis broke): copper volumes disappointed again (Collahuasi/Antamina grades, permitting delays in Argentina), thermal coal prices rolled over, marketing had a flat-vol year at the low end ($2.3bn), and a negative SFO-trial headline hit sentiment — leaving EBITDA stuck ~$11bn, the buyback throttled to protect the 0.83x leverage target, and the stock de-rated to a pure-coal-miner multiple.

Are multiples too high? Trailing yes (11x EV/EBITDA vs peers' ~7.4–7.8x) — but that's the trough-denominator illusion. On base-case forward EBITDA the multiple compresses toward peers; the bull case argues the marketing pool deserves a premium SOTP. The 287x P/E is noise.

Contrarian view (what the market refuses to see): the market still prices Glencore as the coal company that almost spun off its coal, and applies a governance penalty. What it underweights is that (1) 2025 was the copper-volume trough and the company exited it accelerating (H2 +48%), and (2) keeping coal was the correct, value-maximising call — it's the cash engine that funds the copper build and the buyback without dilution. Glencore is quietly using a despised asset to finance the most-wanted one.

Lens 13 · Devil's Advocate (short-seller)

Dismantling the bull case.

• What structurally breaks the model? The marketing edge is real but cyclical and opaque — in a low-volatility, well-supplied commodity world, trading margins compress toward the $2.3bn floor and the "smoothing" benefit shrinks just when you need it. And the integrated story cuts both ways: when you own the mine and trade it, a commodity crash hits both legs.
• Revenue concentration risk. The profit (not revenue) is concentrated in copper-cobalt (DRC/Zambia/Peru/Chile) and coal. Two of the four highest-margin nodes (Collahuasi copper, Cerrejón/SA coal) have already produced negative surprises (guidance cut; impairments). A DRC political shock or a Chilean grade/permitting problem hits the crown jewels directly.
• Why the moat is weaker than bulls think. Trading is a people business — the SFO charges show the talent and the conduct were intertwined; a compliance-tightened, post-monitor Glencore may simply be a less aggressive, lower-returning trader than the Glasenberg-era house. The "$6–10bn marketing EBIT" figure some bulls cite is stale/wrong — management's own through-cycle guidance is $2.3–3.5bn. Bulls anchoring on the high number are mis-modelling the moat.
• Most dangerous competitor bulls underestimate: not Rio/BHP — it's Trafigura and Vitol on the trading side (they contest the arbitrage and don't carry coal-ESG baggage), and a merged Anglo-Teck on the copper side (a focused copper-heavy major with a cleaner ESG profile competing for the same growth narrative and capital).
• Worst capital-allocation moves: historically, the bribery-era growth; more recently, the risk that the $13.5bn Argentine copper programme becomes a long-dated capital sink with partner/permitting/cost-overrun risk in a notoriously difficult jurisdiction. Returning $3.5bn while committing to $13.5bn of future builds is a tension.
• Assumptions that must hold for today's price: copper volumes recover and price stays elevated; coal stays cash-rich for years; marketing stays mid-band; no fresh enforcement shock. Several are exogenous (price) or execution-dependent (volume) — not in management's full control.
• −20–30% growth-disappointment scenario: if EBITDA lands ~$11bn instead of base ~$14–16bn, EV/EBITDA stays elevated on a trough denominator, the buyback gets throttled to defend leverage, and the equity de-rates to a coal-miner multiple — plausibly 20–35% downside from a copper-priced-in level.
• Single permanent-impairment scenario + plausibility: a DRC nationalisation/expropriation or export ban on copper-cobalt assets — low probability but non-trivial given history, and it would impair the highest-margin, hardest-to-replace node. Plausibility: low-to-moderate; severity: high.

Lens 14 · Management Questions (ordered by information value)

1. Collahuasi forced the 2026 copper guidance cut and you only partly control it — what specifically gives you confidence in the 2028 1Mt target, and what is the probability-weighted downside if Collahuasi and Antamina grades disappoint again?
2. The Argentine copper programme is ~$13.5bn over a decade and you're seeking partners — what ownership %, capex split, and IRR hurdle would you accept, and what's your walk-away point on permitting/fiscal terms?
3. You guide marketing to $2.3–3.5bn EBIT through the cycle — post-compliance-monitor and post-SFO, is the structural earning power of the trading book the same as in the Glasenberg era, or has the risk appetite (and therefore the return) permanently stepped down?

4. 95% of shareholders chose to keep coal — at what thermal-coal price or carbon-policy threshold does retention stop being value-maximising, and how do you avoid stranding capital in it?

5. You returned $3.5bn in a down year while committing to $13.5bn of future copper capex — walk me through the priority waterfall (buyback vs base distribution vs growth capex vs leverage) across a copper-price-down scenario.
6. What is current aggregate management/insider ownership, and how is the trading desk now incentivised post-monitor — what changed in comp to align risk-taking with compliance?
7. RMI rose 12% and net funding rose $3.0bn in 2025 — at what commodity-price level does working capital become a balance-sheet constraint on the buyback, and how do you hedge that?
8. Met-coal (EVR) is now your highest-margin unit (36%) — how durable is that margin through a steel-demand downturn, and is the EVR goodwill at impairment risk if met-coal normalises?
9. Smelting margins went negative and you shut capacity — is the integrated smelting node a structural loss-maker now (collapsing TC/RCs), and would you exit it entirely?
10. The SFO trial (Oct 2027) involves former oil-division leaders — what residual legal/financial exposure does the company carry, and what's the worst-case provision?
11. Cobalt is a by-product riding copper volumes into an oversupplied market — what's your strategy to monetise the ~20% mined-supply position without being a forced seller at the bottom?
12. A merged Anglo-Teck creates a focused copper major with a cleaner ESG profile — how does that change your M&A calculus and your cost of capital for copper growth?
13. You walked away from the NY listing on indexation uncertainty — under what conditions (S&P 500 clarity, valuation gap) would you revisit it, and how much value do you think the London listing currently costs you?
14. DRC concentration sits on your highest-margin barrels — how do you quantify and mitigate expropriation/export-ban tail risk on KCC/Mutanda?
15. If copper stays range-bound for three years, what is the minimum sustainable buyback you'd commit to, and at what share-price/intrinsic-value gap do you accelerate it?

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