A Single Mining Project Can Need Up to 800 Suppliers. Can Your Company Keep Pace With All of Them at Once?

Argentina’s mining exports went from USD 4 billion in 2024 to a projected USD 9 billion for 2026: more than double in two years, driven largely by lithium and by the projects moving forward under the Large Investment Incentive Regime. 65% of RIGI applications are mining projects.

That growth doesn’t rest on the big operators alone. According to CAEM’s own data, a mining operation requires an average of 550 supplier companies during the production phase, and close to 800 during a project’s construction phase.

Your company is probably one of those hundreds, and even if you’re serving just one project at a time instead of ten, the challenge is no smaller: getting paid by that project and paying your own overseas suppliers almost never happen on the same schedule.

If your company is one of these suppliers, the question isn’t whether you’ll grow along with the sector. It’s whether the way you handle that gap between what you collect and what you pay can scale at the same pace as the projects you serve.

Two directions, the same money

For a supplier in this sector, money moves in two directions at once.

What you pay

Specialized equipment, technical instruments, spare parts: a good chunk of it comes from a handful of key overseas suppliers, each with their own payment terms, and those terms don’t wait. It’s money that goes out fixed and frequent, whether or not the project’s payment has landed yet.

What you collect

Payment from the project you’re serving, on the other hand, tends to arrive concentrated and tied to contract conditions — construction milestones, approvals, deadlines that aren’t always up to you. The real problem isn’t juggling ten different currencies from ten clients; it’s that this concentrated income almost never lines up with the fixed outflows you have to keep covering in the meantime.

What’s left in between

That mismatch leaves, between one payment and the next, dollars that have already come in but haven’t gone back out yet. And that raises a second question, separate from timing: while those dollars are waiting for the next payment, are they somewhere your company can actually control and audit?

For decades, faced with peso instability, the most common answer in Argentina was to pull that money out of the system through whatever channel was simplest. Today there’s an equally simple alternative, but one that lives inside a structure your own company governs.

What this looks like integrated

With B2B2X, payments, collections, and everything in between stop living in separate processes and move inside your own system.

Pesos, dollars, and euros coexist on a single platform, with no need to coordinate a separate account for every currency you work with, and no need to convert right away what you’d rather hold in dollars while you wait for the next payment.

OAuth2 authentication with service-level access for your organization. A master account with sub-accounts by project, client, or supplier, each with its own balance, so what you pay a supplier in Germany and what you collect from a project in San Juan stay equally visible, without mixing together. Approvals and role-based access control, so holding dollars in the account is a company decision, not one person’s call.

Quote endpoints that show you the cost of a conversion before you execute it. And an audit log of every transaction, available inside your own system.

This isn’t an integration built only for companies already working at scale. It works just as well for a supplier managing that mismatch on a single project as for one scaling across several fronts at once.

(If integration isn’t what your operation needs right now, we also offer a ready-to-use business account, no development required.)

The sector is only going to keep growing. Book a technical call with the B2B2X team, and we’ll see if the way you handle payments, collections, and everything in between is ready to keep up.