One year after closing the $1.40 billion acquisition of Somincor from Lundin Mining, Sweden’s Boliden has the Portuguese Neves-Corvo copper-zinc mine running near the front of the European underground automation pack. According to a feature published by International Mining on 30 April 2026, the operation in Castro Verde, Alentejo, is now one of the few European hard-rock mines combining autonomous loading, semi-autonomous long-hole drilling and a fully deployed underground LTE network — an infrastructure stack that the previous owner began but the new Swedish parent is now pushing through to scale.
The headline pieces of equipment are three Epiroc Scooptram ST18 loaders connected to Epiroc’s Deep Automation platform, plus newly commissioned Epiroc Simba long-hole drill rigs that the operation took delivery of in late 2024 and early 2025. In its first full year with the new Simbas, Somincor ran just under 10% of its drilling in automated mode — a deliberately conservative ramp that lets operators build trust in the machines before pushing utilisation higher. The underground LTE network installed in 2023 replaced the legacy Wi-Fi mesh and is the connectivity backbone that makes the automation work in the deeper levels of the mine.
Boliden completed the acquisition on 16 April 2025, paying $1.30 billion of cash purchase price (plus customary adjustments to a final $1.40 billion outlay). The transaction bundled Neves-Corvo together with the Zinkgruvan zinc-lead mine in Sweden — collectively almost doubling Boliden’s zinc concentrate production and meaningfully boosting copper concentrate output. For Sweden’s flagship base-metals miner, the deal made Portugal one of its three most important production geographies overnight, alongside the Boliden Area and Aitik in northern Sweden and Tara in Ireland.
Why automation matters here. Neves-Corvo is a deep, narrow-vein deposit on the Iberian Pyrite Belt. Long-hole stoping at depth is exactly the kind of repetitive, high-cycle activity that gets the strongest economic lift from autonomy — both because it allows continued operation through shift change and blast clearance, and because consistent drill patterns translate directly into recovery and dilution numbers downstream. The same logic underpins Epiroc’s Deep Automation deployment in Boliden’s own Garpenberg and Aitik mines in Sweden. What is striking about Somincor is that the playbook is now being run with a Swedish ownership lens applied to a Portuguese workforce and a Portuguese regulator.
The financial backdrop is favourable. Boliden reported Q1 2026 group revenues of SEK 27.8 billion, up 32% year-on-year, with EBIT excluding process inventory revaluation of SEK 4.4 billion — among the strongest quarters in the company’s history, lifted by both metal prices and a full quarter’s contribution from the new mines. Boliden’s 2026 mine plan for Somincor guides 1.7% copper at 2.3 million tonnes milled and 6.7% zinc at 2.2 million tonnes milled. The current life-of-mine plan keeps Neves-Corvo in production until 2041.
Why it matters for the corridor. The Boliden ownership of Somincor is the largest single Swedish industrial position in Portugal by enterprise value, and it is now generating a particular sub-corridor: Sweden’s mining-tech supplier base — Epiroc, Sandvik, ABB, Atlas Copco, Mobilaris — has a much clearer route to scale into Portuguese underground operations than it did when the asset was North American-owned. Sandvik already disclosed in its Q1 2026 results that Iberia is one of its high-growth mining-equipment regions; the Somincor automation push is part of why. Mobilaris and other Nordic underground-positioning vendors will see similar pull-through as Boliden integrates its Iberian site into a single fleet management approach.
For Portugal. Neves-Corvo’s political importance is not just the metal. With Savannah Resources advancing the Barroso lithium project and several Iberian Pyrite Belt names re-entering exploration, Portugal is starting to behave like a mining country again after two decades of decline. Having the country’s flagship operation owned by a credible Nordic operator with the cash, technology and time horizon to invest at depth materially strengthens the country’s pitch for new permits, new investment and new skilled migration into Alentejo. Castro Verde’s population numbers are rising for the first time in a generation in part because of the operation.
Execution risk does not disappear. Underground LTE coverage is hard to maintain in active stopes, and autonomous fleets are only as good as the maintenance crews behind them. But the trend line at Somincor is clear: a year after Boliden took the keys, the mine is running deeper, smarter and more Swedish. For Nordic operators, suppliers and capital allocators tracking the corridor, Neves-Corvo is increasingly the case study to watch.