Orlovsky is an active underground mine exploiting a large, polymetallic, high grade, and gold rich VMS deposit. It comprises the Main Orebody, which comprises an upper and lower part with an irregular pod-like shape, 20° to 30° dip to the SW, average thickness of 35m and down-dip extent of 600 m. It is now almost worked out, with the remaining resources consisting of remnant blocks distributed in the lower part of the orebody and representing some 25% of the whole deposit. A 0.85 Mt oxidised cap on the upper part of the orebody has been excluded from the resources since until now, no technology has been successfully developed to treat it.

350 m to the SW of the lower part of the Main Orebody is the New Orebody comprising a southern portion with a 10° to 15° dip to the SW and thickness of up to 56m and a northern portion with very high grade and thickness of 5-20 m. The combined New Orebody occupies a surface area in long section of some 250 m by 150 m and accounts for the rest of the resources in the deposit.

Due to the relatively flat nature of the ore, mechanised drift and fill is the mining method used. Shaft hoisting of ore is used. A rudimentary figure provided in the IPO indicates that mining has been concentrated above 500 m depth prior to 2011 but is now focused on resources up to 1000 m in depth.

There is a single concentrator, known as the Zhezken facility, dedicated to the Orlovsky mine and processes ore to produce separate copper and zink concentrates.

Ore is fed from the shaft via an incline conveyor to four main storage bins of approx 1000 t capacity and three secondary storage bins with a capacity of 500 t. There is no crusher at the plant of the ROM ore is fed directly to the primary autogenuos (AG) mill (7 m by 2.5 m) at approximately 190 t/h. Two AG mills are operated in parallel with a thre stage system.

Feed size to the AG -400 mm and the outlet screen of the AG mill cuts off at 5 mm and oversize is fed back into the AG mill. The undersize goes to spiral classifiers where the oversize from the spirals is fed into the second stage ball mill operated in close circuit with a bank of hydrocyclones. The undersize from the spiral goes directly to the bank of hydrocyclones. The undersize from the cyclones is fed to copper flotation and the oversize is fed back into the second stage ball mill (4.5 m by 6 m). The ball mill with a size of 4.5 m by 6 m is charged with 60 mm steel balls.

The copper flotation is a multistage process involving some regrinding in the third stage ball mills after the first flotation. Tailings from the first stage are fed hydrocyclones where the sicks go to a further third stage grinding stage in 2.7 m by 3.6 m mills. The overflow goes though two further copper flotation stage.

The copper concentrate is dewatered on large rotating horizontal ceramic filters and/or disk filters and/or press filter and them further dried on a rotary dryer. The dewatered and dried copper concentrate is stored in bins for loadinf into rail wagons for despatch to Balkhash.

The zink stream is similar to the copper stream.