The Mining Industry: Projects and Results of 2025
The financial and logistical challenges of 2025 became a moment of strategic reset for market participants. The industry is raising the bar, and meeting new requirements with an old set of tools is no longer possible. New technologies are coming into play.
Baseline Conditions
The situation in Russia’s mining industry over the past year remained challenging for domestic companies. The reshaping of supply geographies continued, alongside the substitution of imported equipment with domestic alternatives.
Many promising projects to launch new deposits and processing plants were put on hold. Even so, several large initiatives moved forward. One of the most notable events in mining and metallurgy was the launch of the processing plant at the Kultuminskoye polymetallic deposit in Zabaykalsky Krai. Reserves at the site are estimated at 820,000 tonnes of copper, 190 tonnes of gold, and 1,400 tonnes of silver. The processing plant at Kultuminskoye is designed to handle 13 million tonnes of ore per year.
In Khabarovsk Krai, copper production increased fivefold following the commissioning of a mining and processing plant at the Malmyzh gold-copper porphyry deposit. Gold output rose by 14%. Further growth is expected with the launch of the second phase of Polymetal’s Amur processing plant, which processes gold-bearing concentrate from deposits in Magadan, Yakutia, Chukotka, and Krasnoyarsk Krai.
Digitalisation and “Unmanned” Operations
The most important trend of 2025 was the digitalisation of mining processes, offering solutions to a wide range of industry challenges. Technologies for end-to-end production management, digital twins of deposits, and drone-based video analytics are advancing rapidly. Russia has already reached a global level in open-pit dispatch systems and AI models for operational analytics.
At the same time, industry participants have not fully aligned on terminology. There is still no single definition of “unmanned technologies” in Russia. In some cases, the term refers to processes where people are physically absent from production sites. In others, it describes operations where artificial intelligence supports human operators, or enterprises built around remote-control systems.
Removing people from the physical production process can also alter established safety standards. For example, in the absence of workers, regulators may allow higher methane concentrations in underground mine atmospheres. In Russia, EVRAZ is a leader in deploying unmanned mining operations. The company has set an ambitious goal of doubling labor productivity across its facilities within 10 years. This approach may offer an effective response to the workforce shortage, which, according to industry experts, affects nearly half of all market players.
The main difficulty in implementing unmanned technologies is that relatively few new mines are being built in Russia. These technologies are most justified and efficient at the design and construction stage. Retrofitting operating mines with such innovations is far more complex.
New Horizons
According to a survey of visitors to MiningWorld Russia 2025, 34.07% of industry participants are currently showing interest in digital transformation and production automation. Another 32.97% are focused on robotics and the use of artificial intelligence, as well as innovations in gold mining, which remains one of the fastest-growing market segments. Market analytics is also a priority for 31.87% of respondents, including key trends, figures, and facts for both Russia and global markets.
It is important to note that most companies are incorporating digitalisation into long-term programs with a planning horizon of three to five years. Despite a shared strategic direction, approaches to economic justification vary. For 70% of companies, direct economic efficiency is the main success criterion for digital solutions. The remaining 30% focus on how digitalisation transforms and improves production processes themselves.
