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Investment deep divesA €200 million loan behind Europe’s copper plans
The European Investment Bank is financing Aurubis refining in Bulgaria and recycling in Hamburg. Long-dated debt is how industrial capacity gets built.
September 11, 2025 · Corby Editorial Team · 7 min read
Last reviewed October 20, 2026
On 11 September 2025 Aurubis signed a €200 million, five-year loan with the European Investment Bank. The bank described it as the first financing under its newer strategy for critical raw materials. The money is for two projects: a larger copper tankhouse in Bulgaria, and recycling and environmental work at Hamburg, including the Complex Recycling Hamburg programme.
Chief financial officer Steffen Hoffmann said the terms were attractive against the market and that the loan widened Aurubis’s funding sources. EIB vice-president Nicola Beer tied the loan to copper supply, recycling and the EU Critical Raw Materials Act. The press release is a funding announcement. Read as such, it is unusually clear about what the capital is for.
Bulgaria: more cathodes, not a new company
Aurubis is investing about €120 million to expand the tankhouse at its Bulgarian site, the largest single investment there since the plant was acquired in 2008. The company expects commissioning in fiscal year 2025/26 and an increase of about 50% in refined-copper output at the site, to 340,000 tonnes a year.
That is a volume number you can check later against production reports. Until the tankhouse is commissioned, it is a plan with a lender attached. Copper demand from power networks, vehicles and data centres is the demand story Aurubis cites, including a widely repeated view that global copper demand could double by 2050. A doubling over twenty-five years is not a reason to ignore a five-year construction and ramp-up risk.
Hamburg: the same recycling project, funded earlier
The loan also backs the €190 million Complex Recycling Hamburg investment. At the time of the signing, Aurubis expected operations to begin in the following fiscal year and described about 30,000 extra tonnes of recycled material a year, plus more complex intermediates from its own smelters. The plant was inaugurated in July 2026. The loan and the opening are one project seen at two dates.
The EIB’s wider raw-materials initiative, adopted in March 2025, points to about €2 billion a year of lending across extraction, processing, recycling and substitution. Aurubis’s €200 million is one ticket inside that intention. It shows how a policy target becomes a signed credit agreement, project by project.
What the loan does and does not tell you
Five-year money from a public bank is a financing fact. It is evidence that a European lender was willing to fund these two plants on the terms agreed. It is not a credit opinion you can borrow, and it is not a view on the Aurubis share price. Public-bank terms can be better than the market precisely because the mandate is strategic. That advantage belongs to the borrower.
For a private client the lesson is about time and specificity. Industrial supply of copper grows when a tankhouse or a recycling unit is financed and then built. If an investment proposal cites “EIB support for critical minerals” without naming the project, the tonnes and the commissioning year, it is using the press release as decoration.
Source: Aurubis, 11 September 2025
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