• Zimbabwe earned US$137 million from steel exports in the first half of 2026
• Manhize is operating at 60% capacity and saving about US$500 million in imports
• Rail investment, domestic procurement and ZISCO restructuring will determine the industry’s next phase

Harare- Zimbabwe's steel sector generated USD 137 million in export proceeds in the first half of 2026, already surpassing the full-year 2025 total of USD 92.1 million in six months. In Q1 2026, steel exports grew 150% in volume to 190,612 metric tonnes and 254% in value to USD 68.22 million alone, following the February 2026 export ban on un-beneficiated minerals. At that trajectory the sector is heading toward USD 250 million to USD 300 million in annual steel export revenue, a figure that would have been unimaginable at any point in the preceding fifteen years.

The Dinson Iron and Steel Company's USD 1.5 billion Manhize plant, operational since June 2024, and currently running at 60% of its 600,000-tonne Phase One capacity, and already saving Zimbabwe an estimated USD 500 million per year in avoided imports is the primary engine of that reversal. Roughly 60% of Dinson's annual production is currently exported to regional and international markets, with Chief Executive Officer, Benson Xu confirming that regional buyers are quite excited by the product quality. Steel exports surged from 413 tonnes in all of 2024 to over 140,000 tonnes in the first half of 2025 alone, transforming Zimbabwe from a net importer into a regional producer within a single production cycle.

However, to fully understand this vivid and growing industry from its scale, its significance, and why its revival carries a weight that goes far beyond export statistics,  it is necessary to track its origins, its extraordinary peak, and the long and painful manner in which it declined. What Zimbabwe is rebuilding in 2026 is not a new industry but the recovery of something it once possessed, lost through decisions that were entirely its own to make, and is now reclaiming through capital and management it had to source from outside its borders because the institutional capacity to develop it domestically had been destroyed over eighteen years of cold, idle, rusting infrastructure. The story of Zimbabwe's steel sector is the story of the country's industrial policy told in its most complete and most unsparing form,  from geological endowment to continental leadership to total collapse to cautious revival,  and it is a story whose ending has not yet been written.

In the middle of the Second World War, in 1942, the Rhodesian government established the Iron and Steel Company at Redcliff, 14 kilometres from the town of Kwekwe, to control all iron and steel production in the territory during a period of global metal shortage. The geological rationale was overwhelming. Rhodesia sat on over 3.8 billion tonnes of high-grade iron ore, 200 million tonnes of limestone deposited just a few hundred metres from the Redcliff works, and 23 billion tonnes of high-grade coal, the seventh-largest coal reserves on earth. The resource endowment for a steel industry was not merely adequate as it was also exceptional by any global standard for an economy of Rhodesia's size, and it was concentrated in a single geographic corridor running from Redcliff through Kwekwe to Hwange whose proximity made the integrated production economics of blast furnace steelmaking viable at a scale that few African economies of comparable size could replicate.

By 1957, the Rhodesian Iron and Steel Commission was producing 250,000 tonnes of steel per year. By the mid-1980s, production had reached approximately 1.2 million tonnes annually, and the plant had been renamed ZISCO, Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Company, following independence in 1980. At its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s, ZISCO's staff exceeded 5,000 and it was perhaps the largest industrial undertaking in the country, with four wholly owned subsidiaries, the mining company BIMCO, Lancashire Steel, Frontier Steel, and the ZISCO Distribution Centres  with a combined turnover that must have exceeded USD 1 billion a year. In 1980, having inherited one of Africa's most sophisticated integrated steel plants, Zimbabwe had trained apprentices, technicians, artisans, engineers and metallurgists at ZISCO, it had captive iron ore, coke ovens, rolling mills and export markets. Few newly independent African states possessed such a strategic industrial asset.

That was the starting point. The story of what happened next was not primarily about steel, but  the decisions a government made with a strategic asset whose commercial logic was sound and whose policy management determined whether it became a foundation of national industrialisation or a monument to institutional failure.

The Decline: A Timeline of Decisions

Independence marked the beginning of a slow and painful decline. In the early years after independence, ZISCO continued to operate and employ thousands. Redcliff and Kwekwe thrived as industrial towns, with decent housing, schools, clinics and stable incomes. Steel production underpinned roads, dams, factories and railways, the very skeleton of the economy.

By 1984, ZISCO was the country's largest foreign exchange earning manufacturer and was top on the list of government subsidies, with the size of its subsidy at almost 2% of GDP. By 1986, the problems began to show. An official enquiry into operations discovered mismanagement, poor planning and nepotism. The report also found that refurbishment of the steelworks had already been lacking before independence, and that further delays were making the plant more expensive to run.

The refurbishment deficit identified in 1986 was the first structural decision point. The government  inherited a capital-intensive manufacturing asset and did not ring-fence the capital expenditure budget required to maintain and upgrade its equipment, preferring instead to subsidise its operations at 2% of GDP while the equipment aged, made the choice that determined every subsequent outcome. Steel plant infrastructure is not indefinitely deferrable. Blast furnaces require relining at regular intervals, rolling mills require roll changes, and coke ovens require rebuilding on schedules that are technically fixed rather than commercially discretionary. ZISCO's management after independence chose to defer those expenditures.

In 1993, ZISCO's blast furnace Number 4, which produced 70% of the company's steel, broke down. The company was then operating at only 30% capacity and started laying off workers. The breakdown of Blast Furnace 4 in 1993 was the event that converted ZISCO's gradual decline into a structural collapse. When a blast furnace goes down and it makes 70% of your steel, you don’t just make less steel, the whole business stops making sense.

Running at 30% capacity isn’t a steel plant anymore, it then becomes  a 1.2-million-tonne cost base trying to survive on one-third of the revenue. You still pay for labour, power, maintenance and the head office. You just don’t have the sales to cover it.

By 2000, ZISCO was operating without a fully constituted board, its blast furnaces were no longer functional, and its plants and equipment were now obsolete. By 2005, auditors discovered money from the sell-off of ZISCO's foreign subsidiaries was missing, and the National Economic Conduct Inspectorate handed a dossier on corruption to the then Industry Minister.

The hyperinflationary environment of the 2000s delivered the final blow to a company that was already functionally dead. By 2008, production had effectively ceased, the blast furnaces were cold, and the coking coal from Hwange that had fed them for forty years was being exported as raw material rather than converted into the metallurgical coke that ZISCO's furnaces required. The town of Redcliff, whose entire economic existence had been built on steel employment, experienced the transformation that a single dominant employer's collapse produces with absolute totality. Redcliff, once a model industrial town, began to resemble a ghost settlement, marked by abandoned houses, shuttered businesses and broken hopes. Former employees, some now elderly and unwell, waited years for pensions that never came. Many died in hardship, their skills and service discarded without dignity.

The Revival Attempts: A Record of Failure That Predicts Nothing

Between 2008 and 2024, Zimbabwe announced no fewer than four major ZISCO revival programmes, none of which reached production. In 2011, Indian firm Essar Africa Holdings signed a USD 750 million deal promising to restore 3,000 jobs and modernise the plant, only for financing disputes and policy shifts to kill the project. A 2017 agreement with Chinese investor R&F Properties, valued at USD 1 billion, unravelled two years later after the new dispensation reviewed it and found the terms excessively favourable to the investor. The Shandong Iron and Steel Group agreement, also structured around Redcliff, similarly produced no material production restoration. Each announcement generated political momentum. Each failure deepened the infrastructure deterioration and the institutional credibility gap whose accumulation made each subsequent agreement harder to finance and each subsequent investor harder to attract.

ZISCO's story is a painful emblem of deindustrialisation, lost jobs, and repeated government promises that never quite materialised. Today, only a skeletal crew of around 400 maintenance workers remains, tending rusting infrastructure in what has become a ghost of Zimbabwe's industrial past.

In March 2026, Statutory Instrument 58 of 2026 under the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Zimbabwe Act placed ZISCO under the Mutapa Investment Fund's Fourth Schedule, ending years of fragmented oversight and placing the 89% state-owned steelmaker under a single entity charged with commercialising troubled parastatals. The Mutapa placement does not restore production. It creates the institutional framework within which a commercialisation strategy can be developed by an entity with a track record of engaging private capital,  the same framework that the fund has deployed at other portfolio companies.

The Manhize Discontinuity

The most commercially significant development in Zimbabwe's steel sector between 2020 and 2026 has nothing to do with ZISCO. It happened 200 kilometres from Redcliff, in Chirumhanzu district at Manhize near Mvuma, where Dinson Iron and Steel Company,  a subsidiary of China's Tsingshan Holdings Group, the world's largest stainless steel producer  built a USD 1.5 billion integrated steel plant from what its CEO Benson Xu described as a wild tobacco field.

Dinson's first batch of pig iron was produced in June 2024. Before Disco, Zimbabwe imported roughly 90% of its steel, draining up to USD 1 billion annually in foreign currency. Today, steel exports have surged from 413 tonnes in 2024 to over 140,000 tonnes in the first half of 2025, transforming Zimbabwe from a net importer into a regional producer. The plant has already saved Zimbabwe an estimated USD 500 million per year in avoided steel imports.

The Manhize plant, currently operating at 60% of its capacity, is set to produce up to 600,000 tonnes of products annually in its first phase, with production rising to 1.2 million tonnes in the second phase. The plant currently employs 2,200 workers directly, with projections of 10,000 direct employees at final production phase, making it the largest steel plant in Africa by employment and output.

The plant's product range has expanded progressively since first production. Beginning with pig iron and steel billets, the company commenced manufacturing steel bars in April 2025, creating 500 additional jobs in Q2 2025. Roughly 60% of Dinson's annual production is currently exported to regional and international markets, with CEO Xu confirming that regional buyers are quite excited by the product quality and service delivery.

The Manhize plant operates blast furnace, electric arc furnace, and steelmaking technology simultaneously,  an integrated production model that mirrors ZISCO's original architecture but at a more modern technical standard, with Chinese engineering expertise, Tsingshan's global supply chain relationships, and an investor whose own balance sheet can sustain the capital investment that ZISCO's government ownership could not protect from political interference and deferred maintenance. The plant also addresses ZISCO's most persistent vulnerability, power. Tsingshan's agreement with ZESA for a 100-kilometre transmission line from the Sherwood substation in Kwekwe to the Manhize plant, combined with the plant's own behind-the-fence power infrastructure, represents the energy certainty that ZISCO's grid-dependent operations never had.

The H1 2026 Export Data: What Manhize Has Changed

Zimbabwe's steel sector generated USD 137 million in export proceeds in the first half of 2026, already exceeding the full-year 2025 total of USD 92.1 million. In  Q1, steel exports grew 150% in volume to 190,612 metric tonnes and 254% in value to USD 68.22 million alone following the February 2026 export ban on raw minerals. The sector is on a trajectory toward USD 250 million to USD 300 million in annual steel export revenue if H2 2026 maintains comparable volume, a figure that would have been unimaginable at any point between 2008 and 2022.

The February 2026 export ban's effect on steel was the clearest available evidence that the policy mechanism works as industrial theory predicts,  ban the raw material export,  the iron ore and coking coal that Zimbabwe was exporting unprocessed,  create the commercial urgency that makes existing processing capacity economically rational to run at full capacity, and measure the revenue uplift. The 254% value surge in Q1 2026 from 150% volume growth is the mathematics  of that urgency: steel exports command a price per tonne that iron ore and coal do not, and the ban converted the volume that was leaving as raw material into the volume that is now leaving as product.

The coke category, USD 102.0 million in H1 2026,  is the complementary data point. Coking coal from Hwange, processed into metallurgical coke that feeds both the Manhize blast furnace and export markets, generated USD 102 million in H1 2026. The combined steel and coke revenue of USD 239 million in 6 months from the Midlands and Matabeleland corridor is the first confirmation that Zimbabwe's iron and steel value chain,  the chain that ZISCO was supposed to anchor in 1942 and failed to sustain past 2008  is generating real, measurable, export revenue at scale under private management.

The Hierarchy Reversal: Steel Has Already Overtaken Diamonds

The speed of Zimbabwe's steel sector revival carries a signal that the H1 2026 mineral exports makes visible but that no individual production announcement has yet stated directly. Steel generated USD 137 million in export proceeds, while diamonds generated USD 43.3 million. Steel has overtaken diamonds by a factor of more than three in a single half-year reporting period, and it has done so despite diamonds having a four-decade head start in Zimbabwe's formal export economy, an established state marketing infrastructure through the Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company, a global commodity market whose 2021 peak of USD 6,000 per carat placed Zimbabwe's Marange and Murowa production among the most valuable per-unit mineral exports on the continent, and a government that has invested more in diamond sector policy debate, royalty structures, beneficiation mandates, forex surrender requirements, ZCDC recapitalisation,  than in any other single mineral category outside gold and PGMs.

Diamonds have been a commercial export from Zimbabwe since 2004. The Manhize plant produced its first pig iron in June 2024. In less than two years of operation, from a standing start on what its CEO described as a wild tobacco field, Zimbabwe's new steel sector has generated three times the export revenue of a diamond industry that has been operating for twenty-two years.

This is not primarily a diamond story, though diamond exports are falling. They totalled USD 143.5 million in FY2025 and USD 130.12 million in the first 10 months of 2025, a 36% year-on-year decline driven by lab-grown competition.  It is a story about policy and execution. Steel exports tripled in 12 months because the February 2026 export ban was applied to an operating plant at Manhize, so the effect was immediate.  Diamonds have declined for three years under unchanged terms, a 10% royalty, the highest in Africa, a 30% forex surrender requirement, and ZCDC operational losses that forfeited 1.4 million carats in 2023 alone.

The comparison makes a single point with unusual clarity. The only path to growth in Zimbabwe's mineral economy is not geological, but structural. It is the combination of commercial management, policy alignment, infrastructure investment, and regulatory certainty that converts a resource endowment into export revenue. Zimbabwe has the same diamonds it had in 2021 when they generated USD 6,000 per carat and USD 143 million in a ten-month period. The diamonds have not changed. The policy and the management of the entity responsible for producing them have produced a different commercial outcome. Zimbabwe had the same iron ore, limestone, and coking coal in 2023 that it had in 1942. The steel they are now producing, USD 137 million in 6 months  was available to be produced in every year between 2008 and 2023. The difference between 18 years of cold blast furnaces and USD 137 million in H1 2026 export revenue is not geology. It is the USD 1.5 billion private investment decision that brought the right operator, the right technology, and the right management to an endowment that was always there.

That lesson,  that reform of the operating environment produces more revenue growth than any geological discovery, any price cycle, or any policy announcement unaccompanied by commercial execution,  is the argument that every other underperforming sector in Zimbabwe's mineral economy must now answer against the steel sector's demonstrated result.

Diamonds can answer it by reforming the royalty rate, restructuring the forex surrender, and investing in ZCDC's operational infrastructure. PGMs can answer it by finishing the Base Metal Refinery at Selous and building the Precious Metal Refinery that keeps platinum, palladium, and rhodium separation in Zimbabwe rather than in South Africa. Lithium can answer it by scaling from sulphate to carbonate to hydroxide within the decade. Steel has already answered it, not with a policy document, but with USD 137 million in six months from a plant that did not exist two years ago. The only question the other sectors must now answer is whether they will wait another 18 years to learn the same lesson.

The NRZ Bottleneck

The most immediate constraint on Manhize's expansion trajectory is not production capacity, it is rail. The NRZ has sought a USD 400 million bailout to link the Manhize steel plant to the rail network. Steel is a bulk commodity whose economics are fundamentally determined by transport cost..

The NRZ's financial position,  an entity carrying decades of deferred maintenance, rolling stock deficits, and track condition deterioration that mirrors ZISCO's own story of state enterprise underfunding  is the systemic constraint that Manhize cannot resolve within its own capital programme. Government decisions on infrastructure in 2026 and 2027 will decide the fate of Manhize’s USD 1.5 billion steel investment. For the plant to be competitive in regional export markets it needs USD 400 million in public rail investment to cut logistics costs. Without it, the private capital is stranded.

Where the Industry Is Heading and What Must Be Done

Zimbabwe's steel sector in 2026 is in the most commercially productive position it has occupied since ZISCO's peak in the early 1990s. It is producing more steel than at any point since the blast furnaces went cold in the early 2000s, it is exporting to regional markets at volumes that confirm demand exists. It is saving an estimated USD 500 million annually in avoided imports, and it is doing all of this without ZISCO  through a Chinese private sector investment that the government facilitated but did not finance, and whose management structure is commercially independent of the political interference that destroyed the original asset.

The trajectory from 600,000 tonnes in Phase One to 1.2 million tonnes in Phase Two to Tsingshan's ambition of 5 million tonnes at full capacity would, if realised, restore Zimbabwe's steel output to a multiple of ZISCO's historical peak and position the country as a major regional steel supplier whose Midlands corridor competitive advantage, coal, iron ore, limestone, and now an operating integrated plant,  is as compelling in 2026 as it was when the Rhodesian government identified it in 1942.

Three decisions will determine whether Manhize reaches that potential or encounters the same institutional constraints that defeated every previous steel revival in this country.

The first is the NRZ rail link. The USD 400 million rail investment is not optional for Manhize's Phase Two. It is the enabling infrastructure whose absence caps the plant at a production and export scale below its economic optimum. The Mutapa Investment Fund, the development finance institutions whose participation in Zimbabwe's infrastructure financing is expanding, and the Chinese banking entities whose relationships with Tsingshan provide a natural co-financing alignment with Manhize's expansion, must treat the rail connection as co-investment in the steel plant's returns rather than as a separate infrastructure project whose financing competes with other priorities.

The second is the Buy Zimbabwe Steel mandate for public construction. Dr Tinashe Manzungu, President of the Zimbabwe Building Contractors Association, called the production of rebars at Manhize a welcome addition. "We are working to close the infrastructure gap as contractors, and this requires huge capital outlay. Manufacturing such products locally will cut costs significantly, making the final products more affordable." A government procurement policy that mandates domestic steel sourcing for every infrastructure project,  hospitals, roads, dams, electrification infrastructure, schools,  provides the captive domestic demand that makes Manhize's Phase Two capacity expansion bankable without depending entirely on export markets whose access requires the NRZ rail link that does not yet exist.

The third is the ZISCO Mutapa decision. The 89% state-owned plant at Redcliff now sits under the Mutapa Investment Fund. The physical infrastructure, blast furnace casings, rolling mill frames, land, rail sidings, water rights, and the town of Redcliff itself retains value even after eighteen years of cold-idle deterioration. The most commercially rational use of that asset in 2026 is not another government-to-government revival agreement whose financing depends on a foreign investor's commitment to a timeline that previous investors have failed to meet, but a structured partnership with Tsingshan's Manhize operation, a Redcliff-Manhize integrated corridor in which Tsingshan operates the Manhize blast furnace and electric arc furnace at full capacity while the Redcliff site provides the downstream rolling and finishing capacity whose product range, flat steel, wire rod, structural sections,  complements Manhize's current output of pig iron, billets, and rebars.

Two plants, eighteen kilometres apart, sharing the Kwekwe-Hwange coking coal supply chain and the Sherwood substation power infrastructure, under a single operator with the technical capability that ZISCO's successive government managers lacked, is the industrial geography whose commercial logic has been waiting for the right ownership structure since 1942.

ZISCO's blast furnaces were cold for eighteen years because the government made a sequence of decisions that prioritised political optics over commercial sustainability. Manhize's USD 500 million annual import saving and USD 137 million in H1 2026 steel exports were generated because a private operator made the opposite sequence of decisions. The lesson of eight decades of Zimbabwean steel history  is that the governance determines whether the geology becomes wealth.