BHP earnings soar on copper mining: CFO on AI’s metal demands

Yahoo Finance Video and Josh Lipton

Wed, February 18, 2026 at 5:50 AM GMT+9

In this video:

BHP

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BHPLF

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BHP Group (BHP) reported quarterly earnings results that impressed investors, with copper (HG=F) contributing significantly to the company’s total profit.

BHP CFO Vandita Pant joins Market Domination host Josh Lipton to explain how copper fits into the company’s overall business model, the role artificial intelligence (AI) plays, and more.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination.

Video Transcript

00:00 Speaker A

Vandita Pat joins me now. Vandita, great to see you. Let’s, let’s dig right into these results, Vandita, because this was a milestone here. Copper accounted for more than half of your profits. So I guess to begin, Vandita, just walk us through what that means for the company financially, strategically. Should we think of Vandita, of BHP as really now a copper company more than Iron ore?

00:36 Speaker B

So Josh, great to be here. And the way you should think about this is we are executing exactly like we said we would, uh, growing copper in last three years by 40 or uh, 30 odd percent. And if you look at our portfolio, uh, the, the interesting part is the balanced nature of that. As you just said, quite a milestone for us with more than 50% of earnings this half coming from copper, but equally, we have a very strong world’s best margin iron ore business uh, as well and very soon potash to come in. So the model, uh, for BHP includes very good performance in copper, in fact, for this year and next year, we are increasing our guidance for copper production, which is a fantastic uh, time to do so with the stronger copper prices while continuing to run the lowest cost iro business in the world, whereby we make $10 per ton more cash flow, uh, compared to our nearest competitor. And this operational performance coming through with record production and shipment after out of iro, but equally in copper, like I mentioned, increasing our guidance for this year and next year.

01:58 Speaker B

Not only that, what we are very excited about is the growth prospects which are coming through and really maturing our growth pipeline in copper, whereby by 2030s, we are mid 30s, we are looking for another, uh, increase of 30, 40% in copper units. So, and all that coming through in, you saw, as you said, in strong financials with the Ebida earnings up 25%, dividend at 60% payout, 73 US cents, which is a market expecta above market expectations.

02:40 Speaker A

Vandita, what what role is the great AI trade and trend playing in the copper story you’re telling?

02:56 Speaker B

Uh, quite a bit, and we are very excited about it. But the beauty of copper, Josh, is that it is a ubiquitous uh, uh demand story for copper. It is needed for our way of life, for economic growth, and now has got this massive uh copper intensity coming out of energy transition and digitization AI’s. Uh, we expect copper to grow from where it is to for next 25 years, uh by 70%. And of that 6% of copper could be just on AI and digitization. While that’s the demand story, what is the challenge in the market is that supply is becoming uh more difficult to get. The projects are big, are difficult, uh, the grades are getting lower. And hence, the demand versus supply dynamics are very strong for a supplier like us, which banks on its reliable performance, uh, year in and year out. We have we are already the largest copper producer in the world and growing into it with from where we are to two and a half million tons of copper by mid 30s, including the byproducts. Uh, so that’s a, that’s a great story for performance today, but also leaning into copper, uh, for times to come when copper will be even more attractive commodity, uh, across across different end users.

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