Mining
Georgia's Top Miner Rich Metals Group Upgrades Madneuli With ABB Tech
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Min
Rich Metals Group, operator of JSC RMG Copper and described as one of the largest copper and gold mining businesses in the Caucasus, has completed an electrification upgrade at its Madneuli mine in southern Georgia using ABB technology, in what ABB calls the first project of its kind in the country. The upgrade covers the Madneuli Expansion project and a new low-voltage motor control centre.
ABB's Electrification business supplied medium- and low-voltage switchgear, power quality systems, uninterruptible power supplies, drives, busbars and digital monitoring tools. The centrepiece is UniGear Digital medium-voltage switchgear using IEC 61850 digital communication, paired with MNS 3.0 low-voltage switchgear built on a modular, withdrawable design intended to cut maintenance downtime.
Rich Metals Group supplies more than 10% of Georgia's total exports, making it one of the country's single largest sources of foreign currency earnings outside tourism and agriculture, according to figures cited in ABB's project announcement. The digital monitoring layer, built around ABB's Digital Systems Center, is designed to give the mine real-time visibility into power quality and equipment health across the expanded site.
The Madneuli investment comes as Azerbaijan's state-run AzerGold pursues a separate $2.1 billion build-out across four gold, copper and iron projects, underlining a broader regional push to modernise Caucasus mining infrastructure and capture more value domestically rather than exporting concentrate for processing elsewhere, a trend also visible in Azerbaijan's newly ordered mining and metallurgy value-chain programme, per regional mining sector analysis.
For Georgia, where mining receives less policy attention than tourism or transit corridors, the RMG upgrade is a reminder that the sector remains a quiet but material contributor to export earnings. Sustained investment in digital electrification could extend Madneuli's productive life and improve safety margins, though neither Rich Metals Group nor ABB disclosed the capital cost of the upgrade or a completion date for the wider expansion.
Mining rarely draws the same policy attention in Tbilisi as tourism arrivals or Middle Corridor freight targets, yet Rich Metals Group's export share puts it in a similar league to Georgia's largest wine and agri-food exporters combined. Analysts who track the sector say digital electrification upgrades of this scale typically extend a mine's operating life by improving fault detection and reducing unplanned downtime, though the payback period depends heavily on ore grade trends at Madneuli, which has been in production for decades and faces the gradual grade decline common to mature copper-gold deposits in the region.
