Capstone Copper Brand Guidelines: The 2022 Union of Capstone Mining and Mantos Copper

An Arizona pit and a Mexican underground mine.

Capstone Copper is a young name built on old mines. It was formed in March 2022, English Wikipedia says, when the Vancouver company Capstone Mining merged with the Bermuda-based Mantos Copper. Each side brought its own operations, and the differences between the mines still reflect the two companies that made it, its chief executive told International Mining in January 2025.

Capstone Mining’s United States operation was Pinto Valley, an open-pit copper mine at the west end of the Globe-Miami district in central Arizona, about 80 miles east of Phoenix. A 2023 project profile by NS Energy traces the property back to the Miami Copper Company of 1909. It passed to the Tennessee Corporation in 1960, which merged with Cities Service in 1969; Occidental Petroleum acquired Cities Service in 1982 and sold the Miami operations to Newmont the following year, when the business was renamed Pinto Valley Copper. Newmont merged it into Magma Copper in 1986, and Broken Hill Proprietary bought Magma in 1995, so the mine became part of BHP after the 2001 merger with Billiton. Sources give its start as 1972, 1974 or 1975: NS Energy says open-pit development began in 1972 and first production came in 1975, with long suspensions between 1998 and 2012.

Capstone Mining bought Pinto Valley in October 2013, International Mining reported. The mine produces copper and molybdenum concentrates and copper cathode, and NS Energy says a US Forest Service plan of operations approved in November 2021 permits it to run to 2039. The property also takes in a ranch with a grazing allotment in the Tonto National Forest, the profile says. Capstone’s second operation was Cozamin, an underground copper-silver mine in Zacatecas, Mexico, which began commercial production in 2006; International Mining has reported on its dry-stack tailings work.

Mantos Copper and two Chilean mines.

The other half of the company came from Chile. Mantos Copper, which the Canadian Mining Journal said was run by the British investment firm Audley Capital Advisors and Orion Mine Finance, bought the Mantoverde and Mantos Blancos mines from Anglo American in 2015. Mantoverde is an open-pit mine in the province of Chañaral, in the Atacama region, made up of four pits, with heap and dump leaching and solvent extraction and electrowinning to make copper cathode from oxide ore, International Mining reported. Mantos Blancos, in the Antofagasta region, has operated since 1960 and mines both sulphide and oxide ores; a project to debottleneck its sulphide concentrator was completed in late 2021.

The combination closed on 23 March 2022, after the regulatory approvals, the Canadian Mining Journal reported that day. Each Capstone share was exchanged for one share of the new Capstone Copper Corp., which trades in Toronto under the symbol CS; former Capstone shareholders held about 60 per cent of the combined company and former Mantos shareholders about 40 per cent. John MacKenzie, executive chairman of Mantos, became chief executive, and Capstone’s Darren Pylot became executive chairman. The journal described the result as a new Americas-focused copper producer.

The merged company kept the Capstone name and added the word Copper, putting its main metal in its name. Its mines also produce gold, silver, zinc and molybdenum as by-products, Wikipedia says, which adds that Mantoverde and the Santo Domingo project are thought to be able to provide battery-grade cobalt.

How copper miners present themselves.

Copper miners sell a raw material, not a consumer product, so their identities are built for investors, governments, employees and the communities near their mines. The pictures tend to repeat across the sector: terraced open-pit benches lit by low desert sun, haul trucks whose wheels stand taller than the workers beside them, the long sheds of a concentrator, and stacks of copper cathode sheets ready for shipment. Copper itself often supplies the colour, in warm orange and brown tones that run through reports and presentations.

Much of the communication is formal. Annual reports, sustainability reports and technical reports on reserves are published on fixed calendars, and quarterly results are written for analysts. Alongside the numbers sit recurring themes: safety, presented as a daily routine rather than a slogan; community programmes in schools, clinics, water and local suppliers; and, increasingly, the place of copper in electricity grids, electric vehicles and renewable energy, framed as the metal of the energy transition.

The sector also has its own meeting places. The PDAC convention in Toronto and the Mining Indaba in Cape Town gather miners, explorers, investors and ministers each year, and company stands, logos and presentation decks are designed for those rooms as much as for the web. Trade titles such as The Northern Miner and Mining Technology report on projects, permits and disputes, which are part of the public record of every large miner.

The companies in this guide differ widely in origin: some began as subsidiaries of older American smelting groups, some as small exploration companies, some as state enterprises. This guide sets out what can be checked about each one — who founded it, who owns it, where it mines and what has been reported about its disputes — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Mantoverde, Santo Domingo and Copper Cities.

The company’s first big project after the merger was in Chile. The Mantoverde Development Project added a copper concentrator to treat sulphide ore, which started up in June 2024, International Mining reported in January 2025, and it called the commissioning the step that had propelled Capstone up the mining rankings. MacKenzie told the magazine that the major processing equipment had been deliberately oversized, and that the next phase, called Mantoverde Optimised, would bring the rest of the plant up to the same throughput. At Mantos Blancos, he said, the work had been to bring a plant some 45 years old up to its design capacity. The magazine has also followed new equipment for the Pinto Valley and Mantoverde fleets and the company’s tests of Eriez’s HydroFloat coarse-particle flotation technology, and it interviewed MacKenzie in Riyadh, on the sidelines of the Future Minerals Forum.

Two projects sit beside the operating mines. Santo Domingo, in Chile, is the company’s first greenfield project there, Wikipedia says, and International Mining reported that combining it with Mantoverde could form a larger district, with an option to produce battery-grade cobalt. In Arizona, the company also runs the Copper Cities project, Wikipedia says. Capstone Copper remains based in Vancouver and listed in Toronto, with four operating mines across three countries: Pinto Valley in the United States, Cozamin in Mexico, and Mantoverde and Mantos Blancos in Chile.

For a design guide, Capstone Copper shows how a merger can join two portfolios under one name that says plainly what the company mines. Compare Anglo American, which sold the two Chilean mines in 2015, and BHP, the previous owner of Pinto Valley. For this guide we use Atacama ochre, slate and desert sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Capstone Copper’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.