Shares in BHP, the world’s largest mining house, hit a record high on Monday, with the group’s value on the JSE, where it retains a secondary listing, breaching the R4-trillion mark as surging copper prices strengthen the group’s bullish outlook.BHP, or the “Big Australian” as the group is referred to in mining circles due to its sheer size, is also riding the wave of its strong 2026 financial year results, which showed copper overtaking iron ore as the company’s biggest earnings contributor for the first time.The group, whose value on the JSE has surged 50% this year, has been ruthlessly on its strategy, which is centred on growing its copper and potash assets organically, targeting 3%-4% copper-equivalent production growth annually until 2035.BHP (Dorothy Kgosi) The 141-year-old group’s economic centre of gravity remains its large, low-cost, long-life assets in Australia and the Americas.It is the group’s copper assets, which churned out 2-million tonnes of copper in the 2026 financial year, that are the crown jewel in the company’s armour — while its iron ore business also reported record output — helping the group declare an $8.7bn dividend, the highest dividend in four years.The price of copper hit a fresh record on the London Metal Exchange in 2026, breaking above $14,000 a tonne as supply struggles to keep up. BHP, as the world’s largest copper producer, sits in a comfortable position, where its copper capital expenditure programme is entirely self-funding at consensus prices, driven by robust cash flows from tier-1 assets like Escondida in Chile.New BHP CEO Brandon Craig last week said the group had a strong portfolio and invested in the right commodities.Read: Copper shines for BHP as it pays highest dividend in four years“Well, obviously, as BHP, we’re really excited about our future in copper, and we have a number of very significant growth projects that we’re working on. Some of them are directly BHP-operated projects, and others are joint ventures and partnerships that we have with others,” Graig said.“We are expanding Escondida. Escondida is already the world’s largest copper mine, but it’s also going through a period of grade decline, and we really want to reinvest into that business with a new concentrator that will allow us to lift up production at that facility.“Sticking with South America, in Argentina, we also have a joint venture with Lundin Mining, and we’re developing what I think is an incredibly exciting project in Argentina; that project is called Vicuna. It’s going to be a multistage project that we invest in. We’re hoping to get to a potential final investment decision as early as the end of this calendar year.”BHP tried twice over the past two years to buy Anglo American, with the biggest drawcard being the latter’s copper assets.Anglo went on to strike a deal with Canadian copper miner Teck. Rio Tinto and Glencore also toyed with a merger earlier this year in another copper-inspired deal, which would have created the world’s largest mining group.Business Day