Nine years ago, iron ore paid BHP's bills. On Tuesday, the company that spent a century as a byword for Pilbara dirt announced that copper has taken over — and the metal is behaving badly enough on the London Metal Exchange to make the timing feel less like coincidence than confirmation.
BHP Group's profit rose by almost a third as buoyant commodity prices lifted earnings, with full-year revenue from copper overtaking iron ore for the first time. The world's biggest miner posted underlying profit that climbed to $13.2 billion for the 12 months through June, up 30% on a year earlier and beating analyst estimates, and rewarded shareholders with a final dividend of 99 cents, its highest in four years and equivalent to a 72% payout ratio. That's the corporate headline. The market headline, breaking the same week, is that the physical copper market is running short of metal — and the two stories are the same story, told from different ends of the supply chain.
Inside BHP's numbers, the shift is stark. The company extracted $18.2 billion in underlying earnings from copper in the 12 months to June 30, up from $12.3 billion a year earlier, while earnings from iron ore were stable at $14.5 billion. Copper now delivers 54% of group EBITDA at a 70% margin, compared with 61% for iron ore — the red metal isn't just bigger, it's more profitable per dollar of revenue. Chief executive Brandon Craig put it plainly: "Copper is the engine that is driving BHP's growth." He didn't need to oversell it. Copper prices were 26% higher on average in the 2026 financial year, doing most of the work for him.
BHP isn't treating this as a cyclical blip. The company expects demand to rise from around 34 million tons per year currently to more than 50 million tons by 2050, driven by grid buildouts and data centers, and it sees room for a supply deficit of as much as roughly 10 million tons annually during the next decade. That's the wager behind BHP's decision to expand output of the red metal by about 40% by 2035 — a bet that whoever owns the copper owns the next decade of industrial demand, from EVs to server farms. Global X investment strategist Justin Lin captured the reappraisal underway among investors: BHP is shedding its old identity as "a lumbering, old-world commodity giant heavily dependent on Chinese demand," and becoming instead "a much cleaner exposure to the future economy."
The squeeze behind the balance sheet
The trouble is that BHP's optimism and the market's plumbing are pulling in opposite directions right now. On the London Metal Exchange, copper rose toward a record, with soaring price spreads highlighting an increasingly acute squeeze in near-term supply — the metal's spot price traded as much as $545 a metric ton above the three-month futures contract, the widest backwardation since a historic squeeze in 2021 forced emergency intervention. Futures are closing in on a $14,500-plus peak reached during a spike in January. On Comex, the distortion has been even sharper: futures reached an all-time record of $6.77 per pound on August 7, while three-month LME contracts touched $14,258 per metric ton the same day.
The mechanism is familiar by now but no less disruptive for it. Traders have spent months front-running a possible Trump administration decision on refined copper tariffs, and the arbitrage has drained metal out of the rest of the world. More than 200,000 tons of copper arrived at US ports in July, the largest monthly volume in shipping data dating back to 2014, adding to a huge hoard in American warehouses and ports and sapping availability for buyers elsewhere. Every ton that lands in a New Jersey warehouse against a tariff that may never arrive is a ton missing from a smelter in Rotterdam or Shanghai — the copper equivalent of hoarding toilet paper, except the shortage is real and the customers are power utilities.
Chile is absorbing the other half of the squeeze. Antofagasta, which just posted an EBITDA jump on strong prices — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation for the first six months of the year rose to $2.84 billion from $2.23 billion a year earlier — was forced days later to trim its 2026 output outlook to between 625,000 and 655,000 tonnes, down from a prior range of 650,000 to 700,000 tonnes, after torrential rain and snow forced a stoppage at its Los Pelambres mine and the Chilean government declared a state of catastrophe in the region. State-owned Codelco isn't faring better: it has cut its 2026 output forecast to roughly 1.34 million tonnes from about 1.37 million, stepping away from the 1.7 million-tonne ambition set by its former CEO. Weather, aging ore grades, and now tariff politics are all leaning on the same handful of mines at once.
Shares of copper miners are registering the mood: the Global X Copper Miners ETF (COPX) closed at $87.34, up +1.91% on the day, part of a run that has lifted the fund well above its 50-day average as investors chase the same electrification story BHP just wrote into its annual report.
The uncomfortable arithmetic is this: the world needs the mines to produce more copper at precisely the moment mines are struggling to produce as much as promised. BHP can pour billions into South Australia and Chile and still not outrun a weather system, a depleting orebody, or a tariff announcement nobody can predict. The metal that is supposed to wire the AI economy is currently stuck in a queue at a Californian port, waiting on a decision in Washington that keeps not arriving.
