Freeport-McMoRan Inc.

Freeport-McMoRan Inc. is an American metals company and one of the world's largest publicly traded copper producers, operating large, long-lived mines in the United States, Peru, Chile, and Indonesia that generated $25.9 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. Its portfolio includes the Grasberg minerals district in Papua, Indonesia — one of the world's largest copper and gold deposits — as well as the Morenci mine in Arizona and the Cerro Verde mine in Peru, which together account for roughly 70% of consolidated copper production. The company also produces gold, primarily a by-product at Grasberg, and is the world's largest producer of molybdenum.

This is a story about an irreplaceable asset base navigating a recovery. The September 2025 mud rush at the Grasberg Block Cave underground mine killed seven workers and halted production at Freeport's most valuable operation. The company spent the next nine months remediating the mine, and by the end of the second quarter of 2026, production rates had doubled from their April restart to roughly 69,000 tonnes per day, with a path to full capacity by end-2027. In the meantime, Freeport's U.S. operations stepped into the breach: operating income from domestic copper mines more than doubled in 2025 and became the highest earnings contributor across the portfolio in the first half of 2026.

The file turns on two questions. First, whether the Grasberg recovery stays on its revised schedule — because every quarter of delay defers the cash flows that fund both shareholder returns and Freeport's ambitious growth pipeline. Second, whether the stock already prices in both a successful restart and what management calls "the most attractive investment-return projects within our industry" — a set of organic brownfield expansions that could add more than 60% to U.S. copper production over the next several years.