How a single accidental ore discovery on the Rio Tuba river grew, over half a century, into the Philippines' largest lateritic nickel producer, a listed multi-resource company, and a rising renewable-energy force — built on patience, partnership, and a refusal to quit at the bottom of the cycle.
A UP-trained lawyer who placed third in the 1961 Bar Exam, Zamora never practiced law. At just 28 he took the presidency of a tiny mining venture in remote southern Palawan in 1969 — and spent the next fifty years turning it into a national institution. Today his son, Martin “Dennis” Zamora, leads the company as President & CEO, carrying the enterprise into its nickel-and-renewables era.
Nickel Asia Corporation (NAC) is the Philippines' largest producer of lateritic nickel ore and one of the largest in the world — a company whose story reads less like a resource-extraction ledger and more like a study in conviction.
Its origin is almost cinematic. In the late 1960s, geologists scouting southern Palawan for a possible logging concession stumbled instead upon a vast deposit of lateritic nickel near the Rio Tuba river. The opportunity fell to a young economic planner named Manuel Zamora Jr., who was invited to lead and co-incorporate Rio Tuba Nickel Mining in 1969. It would take eleven years of perseverance before the first shipment of ore left for Japan in 1977 — a delay that would have broken most companies, and a foretaste of the patience the business would always demand.
From that single mine grew a group of subsidiaries — Rio Tuba, Taganito, Hinatuan (Tagana-an), Cagdianao, Dinapigue and more — spread across Palawan, Surigao del Norte, the Dinagat Islands and Isabela. In 2008 these interests were consolidated under Nickel Asia Corporation, which listed on the Philippine Stock Exchange in 2010. What began as one improbable find is today a diversified natural-resources and energy enterprise producing both saprolite and limonite ore, holding a stake in the country's only two nickel refineries, and building one of the Philippines' most ambitious clean-power portfolios.
Like a drill core read from top to bottom, the company's history shows distinct strata — a decade of struggle, a breakthrough in processing, a public listing, a cyclical trough, and now a diversification into energy.
Nickel ore is discovered by accident near the Rio Tuba river in southern Palawan. Zamora, aged 28, becomes president and major incorporator of a company facing a remote, malaria-prone, road-less mine site.
After eleven years of development and near-crushing early debt, Rio Tuba loads its first nickel shipment — proof that the mining business rewards those with, in Zamora's words, deep pockets and deeper patience.
In partnership with Japan's Sumitomo Metal Mining, NAC builds the country's first nickel refinery and the first large-scale high-pressure acid leach (HPAL) facility in the world. Construction begins when prices are low; capital is recovered in under a year once prices rebound.
All of Zamora's mining interests are brought under a single listed vehicle, positioning NAC as the Philippines' largest lateritic-nickel producer.
Shares list on November 22 amid a market correction, yet debut at a 27% premium to the offer price, raising roughly US$107 million — capital that funds the Taganito HPAL project.
A second, larger refinery in Surigao del Norte — a multi-billion-dollar investment with Sumitomo — deepens NAC's move from raw-ore exporter toward integrated processor.
After 50 years at the helm, Manny Zamora steps down as Chairman and becomes Chairman Emeritus. In 2020 his son Martin “Dennis” Zamora — a former renewables and investment-banking executive — becomes President & CEO.
A global supply squeeze sends nickel soaring; NIKL touches its all-time high. The metal's notorious price swings — the very reason "nickel" derives from a word for a mischievous sprite — cut both ways.
Net income triples to ₱6.27 billion on stronger prices and higher exports. The renewable arm energises new solar capacity and NAC sharpens focus by divesting a minority refinery stake to fund core mining and clean energy.
Through Emerging Power Inc., NAC aims for a gigawatt of attributable renewable capacity — a second growth engine designed to smooth the cyclicality of ore.
It is easy, in hindsight, to admire a market leader. It is harder to appreciate how many times this company could have simply stopped — and chose not to.
The earliest challenge was survival itself. The Rio Tuba project was heavily dependent on power, and fuel was by far its largest cost. In the early years, financial burdens threatened to overwhelm the company. The founder's decision was telling: rather than shut down, management chose to keep operating at a loss. As Zamora himself later reflected, looking back at what they endured, it seemed almost like a miracle that the company came through at all.
The second, permanent challenge is the metal itself. Nickel is among the most volatile commodities on earth; its price has swung from crushing lows to euphoric highs and back again within single cycles. NAC lived every one of them — the late-1990s collapse, the 2020 pandemic trough when the stock fell to its lowest levels, the 2022 supply-shock spike, and the more recent oversupply driven by surging Indonesian production, which pushed 2024 ore prices sharply lower.
There were external shocks few boardrooms ever plan for. Communist insurgents once raided a Mindanao mining site and destroyed roughly eleven million dollars of property — a direct test of the founder's nerve. And the regulatory environment was its own long campaign; Zamora has spoken candidly of years spent negotiating with government, treating relationship-building as an unavoidable, ongoing part of doing business in Philippine mining.
We decided to keep operating at a loss rather than shut down the business. — Manuel Zamora Jr., founder
Even recent success carried a sting. In 2024, reported net income fell to ₱1.52 billion — but that headline figure absorbed a one-off ₱1.55 billion provision on a geothermal exploration investment in Mindoro. Stripped of that charge, the core business still earned around ₱3.07 billion, a reminder that this is a company willing to take honest write-downs on ventures that don't pan out rather than dress up its books.
*2024 core net income excludes a ₱1.55B Mindoro geothermal provision (reported figure: ₱1.52B).
The genius of Nickel Asia was never simply to dig. It was to keep climbing the value chain while everyone else was content to load barges.
The defining strategic leap came through partnership. Rather than exporting all of its ore untouched, NAC joined Japan's Sumitomo Metal Mining to build Coral Bay — the first large-scale HPAL nickel refinery in the world — and later the even larger Taganito HPAL. These are the only two nickel processing plants in the Philippines, and they let the company capture value that a pure exporter never could. Crucially, NAC learned to run a dual engine: the fat margins of raw-ore exports could cushion the processing plants through down-cycles, and vice versa.
The 2010 listing turned conviction into scale. NIKL debuted at a 27% premium and channelled its IPO proceeds straight into Taganito. Over the following years the company grew to seven operating mines and became the country's largest lateritic-ore producer and one of the largest globally, selling well over a hundred million wet metric tons across its history.
Then came the boldest reinvention of all. Reading the global energy transition early, NAC built a renewable-energy arm, Emerging Power Inc. (EPI), and set a target of one gigawatt of attributable clean capacity by 2028. Solar parks in Subic, Leyte, Zambales and Bataan — several in partnership with global players such as Shell — are lifting a growing pipeline from hundreds of megawatts today toward that gigawatt goal, with battery storage and hybrid solutions on the roadmap. Alongside it, exploration subsidiaries are opening a copper-and-gold frontier. A nickel miner is deliberately becoming a multi-resource, multi-energy company.
Indicative gross capacity per company guidance; attributable 1 GW target by 2028.
The market has taken notice. Despite nickel's famous swings, NIKL delivered a total return on the order of +117% over the trailing twelve months, comfortably beating the broader Philippine market — the reward for a company that survived every trough and kept investing at the bottom of them. Behind the numbers sits a sustainability record the company has long championed: progressive rehabilitation of mined land, reforestation, and deep, decades-long investment in the host communities around its mines — the "social licence" that lets a miner keep operating for fifty years.
For everyone working in Philippine nickel — miners, traders, processors and logistics operators — NAC's fifty years offer a rare, fully-worked case study. Six lessons stand out.
Eleven years from discovery to first shipment; capital invested precisely when prices were low. This is an industry that punishes the impatient and rewards those who can hold conviction — and liquidity — across a full cycle.
Raw-ore export is a starting point, not a destiny. NAC's move into HPAL processing shows that domestic value-addition — hard, capital-intensive, and slow — is what separates a lasting franchise from a price-taker.
Pairing local ground-truth with a technology partner like Sumitomo unlocked plants no single party could have built alone. Trust, patiently earned, is itself an asset on the balance sheet.
Progressive rehabilitation, reforestation and genuine community investment are not costs to minimise — they are the reason a mine can still be operating decades later. ESG is operational risk management.
Building a renewable-energy and copper-gold future is a deliberate hedge against nickel's volatility. Great resource companies engineer a second growth curve before the first one falters.
The orderly handover from founder to a professionally trained next generation is the quiet triumph. The goal was never one good year — it was a company that outlives any single cycle, or any single leader.
The mining business requires a great deal of perseverance and deep, deep pockets. — Manuel Zamora Jr.
For a Philippine nickel professional, the most useful thing about Nickel Asia is that its edge was never luck. The Rio Tuba deposit was found by accident, yes — but everything after that was choice: the choice to keep the lights on at a loss, to process instead of merely ship, to invest at the bottom, to rehabilitate the land, to hand the company to the next generation intact, and now to build a gigawatt of clean power beside the ore. Those are choices any serious operator in this country can study, adapt, and aspire to. That is why NAC is not just the market leader — it is, for our industry, a standard worth measuring ourselves against.
An accidental discovery, a lifetime of choices — and half a century of not stopping.