Swapping aluminum for copper will maintain China’s resources, group says
China depends on overseas imports for 60% of its aluminum resources as opposed to 70% of its copper resources.
The copper price jumped to a more than six-month high on Monday as demand prospects brightened after China reopened its borders.
Copper for delivery in March rose 3% on the Comex market in New York, touching $4.03 per pound, or $8,866 per tonne.
[Click here for an interactive chart of copper prices]
Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange hit its highest since June 23, 2022 at $8,711 earlier in the session.
The most-traded March copper contract on the Shanghai Futures Exchange closed up 1.5% at 66,090 yuan ($9,750.52) a tonne.
Mainland China opened sea and land crossings with Hong Kong and ended a requirement for incoming travelers to quarantine.
The reopening of China’s borders marks the end of Covid Zero, a strategy that left the world’s second-biggest economy isolated for three years and weighed heavily on the economy.
On Sunday, more than 36,000 people from Hong Kong departed the city via its land borders, all but one of which go directly to mainland China, according to government data. That’s eight times as many as the departures made a day before and the biggest outflow since Feb. 3, 2020, according to government statistics and data compiled by Webb-Site.com.
“The events of last weekend have seemingly changed many people’s views on the global economy…This in turn has led to talk of green shoots of recovery, full steam ahead for the Chinese, and thus the global economy,” Malcolm Freeman, a director at broker Kingdom Futures, said in a note.
The US dollar eased on China’s reopening of its borders and rising hopes that the US Federal Reserve would slow the pace of its interest rate hikes following the December jobs report.
(With files from Reuters and Bloomberg)
