2008–2017
For more than two decades, RTB Bor has been among the most unprofitable Serbian companies, with the accumulated debt of more than 1 billion euros.[13] However, the Government of Serbia kept investing hundreds of millions euros in new production facilities, and even wrote off company's debts worth 1 billion euros to the government-owned companies such as Elektroprivreda Srbije.[13]
Even with high copper prices on global markets, RTB Bor continued with financial losses.[14] For calendar year 2015 net loss was around 110 million euros and for 2016 it amounted to 42 million euros.[14]
In 2017, Greek Mytilineos Holdings won a multi-year trial against RTB Bor before the Geneva Arbitration Tribunal, seeking $40 million for failure to fulfill the contract and subsequent financial losses.[15] During the 1990s, RTB Bor imported the copper concentrate from Mytilineos, processed it, but never sent back 4,000 tonnes of processed copper to the Greek company.[15] Mytilineos has also launched several other lawsuits against RTB Bor over the non-fulfilled contracts signed during the 1990s.[15]
In 2017, according to the general director Spaskovski, RTB Bor had a positive net result after years of net losses, with $306 million (€255 million) of revenues and $73 million (€61 million) of EBITDA.[16] For 2017, around 18 million tonnes of ore was mined, of which 235,000 tonnes of concentrate was processed and finally, 43,000 tonnes of copper, 5 tonnes of silver and 700 kilograms of gold was obtained.[16] Around 75% of the processed copper is exported, while the rest is being further processed by domestic copper companies "Valjaonica bakra Sevojno" and "Pometon".[17]
