Just after the Spring Festival holiday, on February 24, workers at Fujian Jinshan High-abrasive Materials Co., Ltd. were sorting finished copper balls, labeling them, and orderly loading them onto container trucks. Liu Guangming, deputy general manager of the company, stated that nearly 20,000 tons of orders had been received in January this year, with products mainly exported to six countries and regions. The market is expected to further improve by 2026, and current orders have already reached or even exceeded the production line's capacity. Operational data is better than the best month last year.

The gold and copper industry is the leading industry in Shanghang County. Currently, leveraging its gold and copper resource endowment, the county continuously builds, extends, supplements, and strengthens the chain, driving the gold and copper industry toward higher-end, greener, and integrated development. It is gradually constructing a modern industrial system based on gold and copper smelting, dominated by deep processing of copper, and characterized by the purification and deep processing of rare and precious metals.

Strengthening the gold and copper smelting industrial chain solidifies the foundation for green circular development. Strengthening the gold and copper smelting industrial chain solidifies the foundation for green circular development. Supported by enterprises such as Zijinshan Copper-Gold Mine and Zijin Copper, the county vigorously implements the "mining+" economy. It continuously conducts targeted investment attraction based on industrial chain mapping, challenge-based investment attraction, coordinated regional investment attraction, and the "securities firm + fund + industry" development model. This extends the development of resource comprehensive utilization industries such as sulfur-phosphorus chemicals, sulfur-fluorine chemicals, and green building materials, and derives new materials industrial chains. The county's current cathode copper production capacity has reached 400,000 tons. With the commissioning of a 200,000-ton electrolytic copper expansion project, it is projected to achieve a million-ton-level copper production capacity during the "15th Five-Year Plan" period, further solidifying the resource strategic security capability of the "China Copper Capital".

Expanding the deep and precision copper processing industrial chain drives the value chain to climb towards the high end. According to statistics, the county has gathered 51 copper processing enterprises, including Sun Copper, Mintong Copper, and Yintong Superconducting Technology. Their products cover copper rods, strips, tubes, foils, wires, and cables. They are currently deepening expansion into fields such as power transmission and distribution, electronic information, and home appliances and sanitary ware. This has attracted a group of high-value-added manufacturers specializing in products like special cables, high-end copper alloy materials, high-precision copper foil, new conductive materials, and 5G communication components to establish operations locally. Currently, the county is making every effort to advance the construction of the Shanghang Environmental Protection Technology Industrial Park. This aims to address the bottleneck of insufficient supporting capacity for surface treatment, enabling the local deep and precision processing of primary products. This will drive a breakthrough for Longyan's surface treatment industry, moving it "from non-existence to existence".

Refining the rare and precious metals industrial chain opens up high-value-added growth space. Centered on gold smelting, the county has introduced and developed 5 enterprises above a designated size. Their products extend from gold and silver to gold/silver salts, electronic silver paste, and jewelry. Simultaneously, there is active expansion downstream into high-tech, high-value-added functional material fields such as high-purity gold photosensitive materials, precious metal catalysts, bonding gold wire, nano silver wire, and precious metal targets, developing the rare and precious metals new materials industry sector.

According to statistics, Shanghang County has now gathered 66 gold and copper industry enterprises, including 2 with annual revenues exceeding RMB 10 billion. The output value of enterprises above the designated size has grown from RMB 10 billion in 2011 to RMB 122.2 billion in 2025, accounting for 75% of the city's non-ferrous metals industry. It has become a significant RMB 100-billion-level industrial cluster in Fujian Province.