State-owned Erdenet Mining Corporation halts production once a year for major repair, maintenance and cleaning. Therefore, Mongolia’s biggest ore processing plant stopped its production for two days between 31 July and 2 August. During the two days stoppage, a total of 1410 employees from the company conducted 103 repair jobs on 10 key areas of production.

In June 2016, the Mongolian Copper Corporation acquired 49% of “Erdenet Mining Corporation” LLC (“EMC”) from the Russian Federation’s “Rostec.” The remaining 51% of EMC is held by the Mongolian state.

EMC is considered one of the biggest copper mines in Central Asia alongside the giant Oyu Tolgoi mine operated by Rio Tinto in the Mongolian Gobi. EMC was established in accordance with an agreement between governments of Mongolia and the then Soviet Union. It started i operations in 1978.

Today, EMC is fairly complex plant with capacity of processing approx. 32 million tons of ore per annum and producing around 530,000 tonnes of copper concentrate (approx. 125-thousand-tonnes of copper) and around 4.5 thousand tonnes of molybdenum concentrate annually.