Copper rolling, drawing, extruding and alloying

Copper, zinc, lead, nickel and precious-metal smelting and refining, plus the rod, strip and alloy mills downstream. Canada has real assets here, and 2025 offered an unusually clear look at two of them. Teck's Trail Operations in B.C., one of the world's largest integrated zinc and lead complexes, booked a C$1.1B pre-tax impairment in 2024, when the test put the post-tax recoverable amount of the whole Trail cash-generating unit at C$666M [A]. Teck's stated cause was a "challenging environment for treatment charges due to a global shortage of zinc concentrate". That sentence is the business model: a custom smelter is paid a treatment charge set by the world balance between mine output and smelter capacity, and when concentrate is short, smelters bid that charge down against each other. Trail swung from a C$66M gross loss in 2024 to a C$281M gross profit in 2025 on C$2,489M of revenue — and Teck attributes the recovery to silver, germanium and indium by-product prices and to running stockpiled residues in place of purchased concentrate, while refined zinc output was deliberately cut to 229,900 tonnes [A]. The profit came from not doing the core activity. In Quebec, Glencore had planned nearly C$1B over five years at the Horne copper smelter, C$300M of it for emissions reduction, and suspended all of it in February 2026 for want of regulatory certainty ahead of limits that take effect in March 2027 [A]. So the capital runs to ten figures, is periodically written off by its owners, and is hostage to an air permit. Eighteen of the 78 Canadian establishments have fewer than five employees — most likely small alloyers and precious-metal refiners. That fringe was not examined.