When a listed company sees its market value evaporate by 70 billion yuan in a single day, it's a significant blow.
For Zijin Mining Group Company Limited (ASX: ZIJIN), what's truly surprising might not be the sharp decline itself, but the timing of it: the plunge occurred just after the company released what could be considered its best-ever financial results.
On June 23rd, this Chinese mining giant suffered a heavy setback, with its A-share price plummeting 8.84% in a single session, wiping out over 70 billion yuan in market capitalization. For its 1.25 million optimistic shareholders, this was undoubtedly a sudden and unexpected blow.
This is because over the past two years, Zijin Mining has been one of the most certain winners in the A-share market.
When gold rises, it profits; when copper prices rise, it profits; when the new energy sector booms, it profits; when AI drives expectations for copper demand, it still profits. In a sense, the hottest stories in the capital markets over the past few years have almost all circled back to Zijin Mining's financial statements.
And the financial reports have indeed not disappointed investors.
In 2025, the company achieved a net profit of 51.777 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 61.55%. In the first quarter of 2026, net profit reached 20.079 billion yuan, nearly doubling year-on-year and setting a new historical record for the same period. Riding this momentum, its stock price surged over 130% at one point in the past year.
Why would an industry giant with record-breaking performance, capitalizing on almost every market trend, receive such a blow at the peak of its success?
It's difficult to dismiss this as a simple "technical correction." The day after the crash, Zijin Mining's stock price continued to languish, with a cumulative year-to-date pullback approaching 20%.
Even more telling is that on the same day Zijin Mining crashed, gold fell, silver fell, non-ferrous metals fell, and even the seemingly unrelated Bitcoin also corrected.
Several seemingly unrelated asset classes were collectively sold off on the same day.
What exactly is this global "receding tide" for commodities warning about?
The Better the Performance, The Harder the Fall
If you overlay Zijin Mining's financial reports and stock price chart from the last two years, you'll notice a paradoxical phenomenon: profits have been rising, but the stock price has been falling.
This conflicts with most investors' common sense. A company earning 50 billion yuan is certainly worth more than one earning 5 billion, and doubled profits should logically make it more attractive to buy. However, the resource sector often operates contrary to common sense, and Zijin Mining is currently the prime example.
Financially, Zijin Mining is in its best phase since inception. In 2025, the company achieved operating revenue of 349.079 billion yuan and a net profit attributable to shareholders of 51.777 billion yuan, up 61.55% year-on-year. In the first quarter of 2026, performance accelerated further: revenue was 98.498 billion yuan, and net profit attributable to shareholders was 20.079 billion yuan, a massive 97.5% year-on-year increase, marking the first time quarterly profit exceeded 20 billion yuan.
Looking at a longer timeframe, this growth is extraordinary. Annual net profit in 2020 was less than 7 billion yuan; five years later, a single quarter's profit already exceeds that full-year figure. This profit isn't derived from accounting tricks but is genuinely mined from the ground.
Over the past year, international gold prices repeatedly hit new highs, LME copper prices rose over 30% year-on-year, and lithium carbonate prices gradually recovered. Simultaneously, the Julong Copper Mine's Phase II ramped up production, and overseas projects in Ghana and Kazakhstan contributed incremental output, creating an ideal scenario of rising prices and volumes.
The market thus wove an extremely attractive narrative: gold provides a hedge, copper meets long-term demand from AI and new energy, and lithium forms a second growth curve. From gold to copper, from new energy to artificial intelligence, almost every hot theme in the capital markets found a reflection in Zijin. Overseas investment banks even gave a target market capitalization exceeding 1.4 trillion yuan, implying nearly double the upside.
During that period, a saying circulated: "Gold is for defense, copper for offense, and lithium for the future." Zijin seemed no longer a traditional mining company but a super-company with both resource scarcity and growth attributes, capable of finding profit opportunities whether the economy recovered or declined.
It sounded like there was almost no way to lose.
However, capital markets are most adept at casting doubt on a story just when everyone believes in it. Precisely when performance hit new records and institutions were raising target prices, funds quietly retreated. From the mid-May high this year, the stock price fell over 20% in just over a month; from its historical high of 44.94 yuan, the maximum decline approached 40%.
Fund flows are even more telling. On the day of the June 23rd crash, net outflows from major funds were 2.679 billion yuan, while net inflows from retail investors were 2.129 billion yuan, showing a pattern of major players fleeing and retail investors stepping in. According to the Q1 2026 report, the China Securities Finance Corporation cumulatively reduced its holdings by 254 million shares during the quarter, a reduction of about 36.76%.
On one side, profits doubled and institutions were bullish; on the other, the stock price fell and funds withdrew, creating a stark contradiction. The financial reports show almost no obvious negatives, yet the stock price behaved as if facing a major crisis. The company's fundamentals haven't changed significantly: mine capacity remains, overseas projects are progressing normally, and the logic supporting growth (rising gold prices, growing copper demand, resource revaluation) hasn't fundamentally reversed.
This market decline may have deeper underlying reasons.
Many first-time buyers of resource stocks fall into the same trap. Over the past decade, most wealth stories in the Chinese stock market came from consumption and technology: when Moutai made money, its stock rose; when Tencent made money, its stock rose; when BYD's sales rose, its stock rose. This formed a simple logic: "the more money you make, the higher the valuation."
But resource enterprises are fundamentally different from consumer companies. Selling liquor earns brand money, selling phones earns product money, while selling gold and copper often earns money from price increases. When the copper price rises from $8,000 to $10,000, the mines, equipment, and workers remain the same; what changes is that the ore underground becomes more valuable.
This is precisely what makes the resource industry both fascinating and dangerous: profits can skyrocket when times are good; but once the market doubts whether prices can be sustained, the stock price often reacts first.
The A-share market has repeatedly validated this pattern. When coal profits hit historical highs in 2021, the market discussed peak coal prices; when lithium mining performance was most impressive in 2022, stock prices turned first; when polysilicon profits peaked in 2023, the sector entered a prolonged bear market.
The harsh rule for resource stocks is: the stock price doesn't bottom at the worst performance, nor does it peak at the best performance; it always acts ahead of the financial reports.
While everyone discusses whether Zijin can earn 50 billion yuan this year and 70 billion next year, the market's real concern has already shifted:
If gold stops rising, and copper also stops rising, how much valuation can today's nearly perfect financial report still support?
What Is the Market Afraid Of?
If we rewind to June 23rd itself, we find that Zijin Mining's crash was just the tip of the iceberg.
What's truly noteworthy is a rare resonance that appeared in the markets that day: gold fell, silver fell, non-ferrous metals fell, and even the usually independent Bitcoin followed with a correction.
International gold prices fell nearly 1.8% that day, silver fell over 5% at one point, and the A-share China Securities Nonferrous Metals Index plunged nearly 8%. These seemingly unrelated assets faced concentrated selling pressure on the same day.
Over the past two years, gold told a story of hedging, copper told a story of AI data centers, and Bitcoin told a story of a digital future. Their ability to rise together essentially relied on the same trump card: extremely loose global liquidity.
That is, the market was willing to believe that future money would become increasingly cheap. When money is cheap enough, people are willing to pay for the future, allowing the pricing of copper demand and gold premiums ten years out to be brought forward and discounted.
However, on June 23rd, the market suddenly realized that this script was being torn up by the Federal Reserve.
There was another easily overlooked signal that day: the offshore Chinese yuan (CNH) exchange rate rebounded over 0.3%.
Viewed in isolation, exchange rate fluctuations might not be unusual. But when the yuan's rebound, gold's decline, and the non-ferrous metals correction occurred almost simultaneously, they reflected the same underlying sentiment: the market is reassessing the future direction of US dollar interest rates.
In other words, the "Fed rate cut" logic repeatedly traded over the past year is beginning to show cracks.
What further unsettled the market was the latest policy signals from the Fed. Recently, several Fed officials have made hawkish comments, with a core official stating publicly: "If inflation proves sticky or rebounds, the Fed does not rule out reconsidering the possibility of rate hikes."
If the market was previously trading on "when will rate cuts come," now, smart money is already hedging against the extreme risk of "the Fed resuming rate hikes."
For Zijin Mining, this shift is particularly sensitive. Because the two core assets supporting the company's profit growth in recent years—gold and copper—are essentially commodities highly sensitive to liquidity.
Gold may seem like a safe-haven asset, but what's really being traded is US dollar credit and real interest rates; copper may seem like an industrial metal, but its price is also deeply influenced by global economic expectations and liquidity conditions.
Conversely, when the market begins to doubt whether Fed rate cuts will materialize and starts reassessing how much longer gold and copper can rise, Zijin Mining naturally becomes one of the first targets for repricing within the resource sector.
From this perspective, the June 23rd crash is less about the market suddenly turning sour on Zijin Mining, and more about the market starting to worry about something else:
If the macroeconomic environment that supported the rise of gold and copper over the past few years is reversing, then is Zijin Mining's dazzling, near-perfect report card a new starting point, or the most prosperous peak of a resource cycle?
A Reckoning on Identity
Looking back at Zijin Mining's path to deification over the past few years, you'll notice a very interesting phenomenon:
Whenever the company's performance hits a new historical high, the market always revisits the same question—is Zijin Mining still a cyclical stock?
Over the past decade, Zijin has indeed grown into an anomaly in the A-share resource sector. Unlike traditional mining companies that passively "wait for the right time," it operates like a cold industrial expansion machine, transforming itself from a local mining enterprise in Shanghang, Fujian, into a global behemoth through continuous acquisitions and global expansion.
Traditional resource companies rely on cycles to make easy money, while Zijin Mining seems more focused on actively "creating incremental growth."
Gold provides stable cash flow, copper meets demand from new energy and AI, and lithium bets on the next industrial opportunity. As this logic was repeatedly validated, "resource growth stock" gradually became the new label the market gave to Zijin Mining.
The problem is, capital markets never change the underlying laws of the resource industry just because of a new label.
Numbers are sometimes more honest than stories.
Take the first quarter of 2026 as an example. The company's net profit nearly doubled, seemingly a result of capacity release and improved operational capabilities. But upon closer inspection, price factors still played an extremely important role.
In the first quarter, international gold prices rose over 25% year-on-year, LME copper prices rose over 30% year-on-year, and lithium carbonate prices also recovered significantly from their lows.
In other words, Zijin Mining has certainly become stronger, but supporting this impressive financial report isn't just the company's own growth capability; it also includes the cyclical红利 brought by rising resource prices.
And this is precisely where the market is most conflicted: for growth stocks, investors are willing to pay for the future; for cyclical stocks, investors always worry whether the future will worsen.
This is also why the resource industry often exhibits a seemingly very反常 phenomenon: the better the profits, the lower the valuation.
From coal to lithium, from polysilicon to shipping, similar stories have played out repeatedly.
Because the market understands clearly that the time of fattest profits is often also the time when commodity prices are most expensive; and when commodity prices are most expensive, it usually意味着 the room for further price increases is shrinking.
In fact, what makes funds hesitate isn't just price, but also growth.
One of Zijin Mining's greatest advantages over the past decade has been its ability for continuous expansion.
Constant acquisitions, constant production increases, constantly寻找新的增长来源. But when a company grows into a global mining giant, growth itself becomes increasingly difficult.
After the Julong Copper Mine's Phase II capacity ramps up, how many comparable, high-quality mines of similar scale remain globally for it to devour?
In an era of normalized global geopolitical博弈, can overseas acquisitions proceed as smoothly as in the past?
Can the much-anticipated lithium business, in the red ocean of oversupply, carve out a second profit curve?
These questions have no answers for now, but the capital market won't wait for answers before pricing. Because what the market most loves to reward is never "you are very profitable today," but "you can be more profitable tomorrow than today."
For a super-giant earning 50 billion yuan annually, the difficulty of adding another 10 billion yuan in profit even exceeds that of a small or medium-sized enterprise achieving a several-fold逆袭.
Growth hasn't disappeared, but the most spectacular爆发期 of the神话 may be nearing its end.
From this perspective, what Zijin Mining faces now isn't a simple stock price adjustment, but a reassessment of its valuation framework.
The market is re-answering a question: Is it a growth company or a cyclical company?
If the answer leans towards the former, then the current pullback may be just a阶段性修正; if the answer leans towards the latter, then even the most beautiful financial report can hardly escape the cyclical stock's valuation framework of "climax followed by curtain call."
This is perhaps the truth that its 1.25 million shareholders are most unwilling to face, yet must confront directly.
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