- Mota-Engil wins a 30-year concession to modernise a DRC railway link.
- The 1,037 km line connects Congo’s copper belt to Angola’s Lobito port.
- Total investment over the concession is expected to reach $1.8 billion.
- China Communications Construction Company holds 32.41% of Mota-Engil.
By ZiMining/Reuters
PORTUGAL’S biggest builder, has won a 30-year deal to fix up and run a railway in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Reuters reported.
The line will link Congo’s copper and cobalt mining areas to the Lobito Corridor in Angola, a route the United States has backed financially and diplomatically.
Reuters reported the deal is expected to bring in $1.8 billion in investment over its lifetime. The railway itself runs 1,037 km, connecting mining hubs like Lualaba and Haut-Katanga — both part of Congo’s copper belt — to the Atlantic Ocean, via Angola’s Lobito port.
Congo is the world’s second-largest copper producer. Once upgraded, the line is expected to move up to 13.7 million metric tonnes of freight a year, Reuters reported.
This is only the Congolese half of the corridor. The Angola side has already been running since January 2024, according to public filings from Africa Finance Corporation and Lobito Atlantic Railway. That stretch, about 1,300 km from the port of Lobito to the DRC border, recently closed a $753 million financing package, backed by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and the Development Bank of Southern Africa.
The whole point of the corridor, from Washington’s side, is to reduce reliance on China for critical mineral supply chains. The U.S. has put money and diplomatic weight behind that goal, Reuters reported.
But there’s a catch worth knowing. Mota-Engil is 40% owned by the family that founded it, and 32.41% owned by China Communications Construction Company, a Chinese state-owned firm that also holds a seat on Mota-Engil’s board, according to Reuters. So a corridor built to move away from Chinese-linked mineral logistics is, in practice, being built by a company that’s nearly a third Chinese-owned.
Mota-Engil is already part of the group running the Angola side of the line, together with commodities trader Trafigura and rail operator Vecturis, Reuters noted. On the Congo side, the country’s Council of Ministers approved the framework for this railway, running from Dilolo through Kolwezi and Lubumbashi to Sakania, back in mid-July, according to the government’s own record of that meeting.
The concession itself, now confirmed, still needed formal signing at the time.
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