Tianjin Meiteng Technology, a Chinese intelligent mining sorting technology provider, has completed the trial operation of an ore sorting system at Tajik-China Mining’s lead-zinc operations in Tajikistan, successfully commissioning five XRT sorting units in a project that the company describes as a key milestone in its international expansion.
Tajik-China Mining is one of Tajikistan’s largest mining enterprises and Asia’s largest lead producer, operating primarily in Sughd Province near Zarnisor with a fully integrated chain spanning exploration, mining, beneficiation and smelting. The company accounts for approximately 50% of Tajikistan’s total mining output. Despite its scale, its beneficiation plant has long contended with difficult operating conditions — ore grades are low, temperatures swing between -35°C and +40°C, and the combination has historically driven high grinding mill loads, elevated processing costs and equipment reliability problems.
An earlier attempt to address these challenges with sensor-based sorting technology introduced in 2023 failed to achieve continuous and stable operation. In 2025, Tajik-China Mining brought in three XRT units from Meiteng to sort ore in the 70 to 30 millimetre and 30 to 10 millimetre size fractions. Trial operation began in October 2025, and by the time the system was formally commissioned in March 2026, the cumulative waste rejection rate had reached 14.83%, with lead and zinc grades in the tailings consistently controlled at around 0.4% — results Meiteng says exceeded all design expectations. Following project completion, Meiteng also retrofitted the previously installed third-party equipment that had failed to operate reliably, restoring it to normal production, and has since taken over operation and maintenance of all XRT units on site under a customer-authorised arrangement.
The Tajikistan project forms part of a broader Central Asian push by Meiteng, which listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market eight years after its founding and has since formed joint ventures with two Fortune Global 500 companies — Shandong Energy Group and Jinneng Holding Group — to advance intelligent mineral processing technology. Following the Tajikistan delivery, the company established a Central Asia-dedicated spare parts warehouse, technical service team and commercial network. It has since deployed five additional XRT and TGS fine coal sorting systems across mining operations in Kazakhstan’s Karaganda Region and Russia’s Kemerovo Region, handling particle sizes from 400 millimetres down to 6 millimetres across underground, surface and open-pit applications.
