Nearly 12% Copper: AZ9 Drills Its Best Hole of the Year
Azzuro Resources continues to grow its Red Hill discovery, with a standout high-grade copper hit and further drilling results still to come.
Nine months ago, Azzuro Resources (ASX: AZ9) took a punt that decades-old drilling data from a forgotten corner of Mongolia would hold up.
This morning, that punt coughed up the richest interval of AZ9's 2026 program, 1.6 metres of massive sulphide grading 11.94% copper, with gold and silver riding along.
Most of the world’s copper mines make good money on ore grading under 1%, so a number starting with 11 gets the calculator out every time (and a geologist or two double-checking the lab hasn’t slipped a decimal point).
Skinny bands like this one work as signposts, and Red Hill’s copper has grown richer with every step west the drills have taken. This hole, punched 124 metres west of the drilling before it, says to keep heading west.
Red Hill now runs close to 550 metres end to end, growing longer with every batch of assays this year, and is still open along strike and down-dip.
North of the copper sits a gold corridor, and the drilling pulled 6 metres at 4.18 g/t from less than 19 metres down.
Chasing gold that shallow is about the cheapest exploration going, and any future pit would barely need to scratch the surface before it’s in ore.
The remaining assays land over the coming weeks, and metallurgical testwork starts this quarter. This is the first step towards developing Red Hill alongside AZ9’s Oval copper-nickel discovery nearby.
Each batch of assays has now made Red Hill bigger or richer, and the share price has spent the same stretch drifting the other way.
Strip out the $4.5 million in cash from the $13.5 million market cap, and at 1.7c the market is paying roughly $10 million for two copper discoveries in Mongolia.
With results still rolling in for weeks yet, it’s going to get plenty of chances to change its mind.
Today’s Results
AZ9 dropped the results of five new holes and four of them hit. Between the copper down south and the shallow gold up north, nearly every hole they’ve dug this year has added metal somewhere on the map.
The pick of today’s bunch is MU2605, where the headline 1.6 metres sits inside a hole that ran copper most of the way down. Seven metres at 0.80% from 75 metres, then another 14.2 metres at 0.55% leading straight into the massive sulphide itself.
It’s confirmation after AZ9’s geologist had eyeballed this core back in June and logged it as visually copper-rich.
A word of caution though, 1.6 metres is skinny, and spectacular grades over skinny intervals can shrink in the wash. The next round of holes needs to show how far that rich zone runs.
Even so, a grade like that only turns up in serious systems, and it suggests Red Hill could be hiding something special.
Another hole (MU2604) brought the width, 18 metres at over 1% copper from 74 metres down, with gold and silver through it and a zone of serious zinc buried inside.
The gold corridor got a nudge too, with MU2606 pushing the zone east to match up with a hit from last year's drilling about 50 metres away. It finished in copper as well, so there's something to chase northwards.
MU2608 added copper at the western end, and MU2607, drilled near the eastern licence boundary, came up largely empty (most programs have one).
Add it up and four from five is a scorecard most juniors would frame and hang in the boardroom.
Metallurgy and the Test That Can Make a Mine
Assays from the remaining Phase 1 holes are due over the coming weeks, so the news flow will keep rolling on. Drilling is a summer sport in Mongolia, and they’re right in the middle of theirs.
Metallurgical testwork kicks off this quarter, and the recovery rate it spits out is the number we’re most keen to see. The lab will take a chunk of Red Hill rock, crush it, and measure how much of the copper can be recovered into something a smelter will pay for.
A deposit can carry all the grade in the world, but if the copper won’t separate from the rock cheaply, none of it matters.
Last year AZ9 ran the same testwork at Oval, its copper-nickel discovery eight kilometres up the road, and the copper came back at recoveries up to 95%, which is right up with the best in the business.
Pull that off again at Red Hill and suddenly AZ9 has two discoveries close enough to share the same plant and equipment.
All of this is happening with copper above US$6/lb or US$13,000 a tonne, fresh off record highs last month.
The big miners are scrambling for new supply and finding very little of it, so every decent copper discovery gets a much longer look than it did a few years back.
AZ9 is drilling one out at the right time.
From here the team feeds today’s results back into the targeting work and lines up the next round of holes.
With the system open along strike and at depth, the hardest part will be choosing where to put the rig first.
Our Take into the Back End of 2026
There’s been almost a dozen announcements on this ground since last October, and the project has come out of nearly every one bigger or richer.
Runs on the board like that usually earn a junior a re-rate, and AZ9 is still waiting on theirs.
The market values the company at $13.5 million with a third of that sitting in cash, and the longer the drills keep delivering, the harder those two numbers are to square.
Red Hill is still an exploration story and skinny high-grade hits need follow-up before anyone gets carried away. If the next batches join those rich zones together with some proper width though, AZ9 is holding two copper discoveries in one district at a valuation that assumes neither of them works.
Between now and the back end of 2026 there's a steady drip of catalysts, the remaining Phase 1 assays from Red Hill and a second prospect called Copper Ridge, the first met numbers, and a fresh round of targeting off today's results.
Cheap gets fixed eventually, and the assays keep arriving.