The cobalt in a phone bought in Sydney or Seoul almost certainly came out of the ground in the southern Congo. Little of the money it generates stays there.

The Democratic Republic of Congo sits on mineral deposits valued at an estimated twenty-four trillion dollars, a figure that turns up in advocacy material, mining-sector research and the United States government’s own commercial guide to the country, which notes that most of those resources remain untapped. The same country is described by the World Bank as among the five poorest nations in the world.

Both statements are true at once, and the gap between them is the more interesting subject than either number alone.

What the twenty-four trillion actually counts

The figure is an estimate of in-ground value, not a balance sheet, and it has been circulating in roughly its current form since the late 2000s, well before the lithium-ion battery boom made cobalt a strategic word in Washington and Brussels. Valuations of that kind assume every tonne gets located, financed, extracted, processed, shipped and sold at prices that hold. No country converts geology into revenue at anything near face value. Norway does not. Australia does not.

The production numbers are a different matter, because these are measured rather than modelled. In its 2025 Mineral Commodity Summaries, the US Geological Survey put the DRC at an estimated 76 per cent of world cobalt mine production for 2024, with Indonesia a distant second at 10 per cent. The country is also the world’s second-largest copper producer, after Chile. Whatever the in-ground estimate is worth, the output share is not in dispute.

The poverty figures are firmer than the wealth figure

Here the data is unusually specific. The World Bank puts poverty at 81.1 per cent measured against the three-dollar-a-day purchasing-power line for 2025. A 2024 household survey by the national statistics institute found 69 per cent of the population below the national poverty line. The country ranked 164th of 174 on the 2020 Human Capital Index.

The economy is not stagnant. It grew 6.5 per cent in 2024, driven by a 12.8 per cent expansion in the extractive sector. The World Bank’s own summary attributes the disconnect to limited job creation in mining and to structural weaknesses that keep growth narrow.

A large open-pit copper operation employs a few thousand people in a country of over a hundred million.

Where the value is added

The DRC exports cobalt mostly as hydroxide or concentrate: an input, not a finished product. The USGS notes that China is the leading producer of refined cobalt, and that most of its refinery output comes from partially refined material imported from the DRC and Indonesia. Its 2025 world minerals outlook also records that companies owned or controlled by Chinese entities account for most cobalt production inside the DRC itself.

Margin in a battery supply chain lives at refining, chemical processing and cell manufacture. Almost none of it reaches the pit. That is ordinary commodity economics, the same pattern that shapes oil, coffee and cocoa. What is unusual here is the width of the gap.

Kinshasa’s attempt to change the split

In February 2025 the DRC’s strategic minerals regulator, ARECOMS, suspended cobalt exports outright. Benchmark prices had fallen below ten dollars a pound, a level not seen in around two decades outside a brief dip in 2015. The suspension was extended twice before ending on 15 October, replaced by a quota system.

The numbers, as reported by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence: 18,125 tonnes permitted for the remainder of 2025, then an annual ceiling of 96,600 tonnes for both 2026 and 2027, of which 87,000 tonnes go to producers pro rata on historical export volumes and 9,600 tonnes are held at the regulator’s discretion. That ceiling is less than half of what the country exported in 2024. In late June 2026, ARECOMS ordered that first-half quotas left unshipped be forfeited into its own strategic reserve.

Prices have moved a long way since the ban was announced. Fastmarkets data cited in trade coverage puts the increase at more than 160 per cent.

In our reading, this is a producer state using the one lever available to a dominant supplier: the ability to restrict volume. Whether that shows up as state revenue is one question. Whether state revenue reaches schools and clinics is a separate one, with its own history of failing in this country. The quota framework addresses the first. It says nothing about the second.

What to watch

Three things. Whether the quota regime survives intact through 2027, given that administrative bottlenecks have already kept actual shipments well below allocated volumes. Whether the price gain shows up in published government receipts rather than in trader margins. And whether cobalt demand holds at all: the USGS has flagged that cobalt-free lithium iron phosphate chemistries already hold significant market share in China, and that manufacturers are reducing cobalt content in the batteries that still use it.

That last point gets the least attention. An in-ground valuation is a price multiplied by a tonnage, and prices are not a property of the rock. If battery makers keep engineering cobalt out, the twenty-four trillion is revised downward without a single tonne leaving Katanga.