China smelter group agrees to lower Q1 copper charges
The charges tend to fall when ore supply declines and rise when more concentrate is available.
In February copper hit a 21-month high on the back of optimism that Donald Trump’s $500 billion-plus infrastructure plan would add fuel to the fire of Chinese economic stimulus already working its way through commodity markets.
Any US stimulus now appears further in the distance and over the weekend it also became apparent that Chinese support for the sector is waning as imports of the metal, widely used in the construction, manufacturing transportation and power industries, decline sharply.
The price is now back to where it started 2017 with copper futures trading on the Comex market in New York falling more than 2% from Friday settlement trading near its day low of $2.4725 per pound ($5,450 a tonne) in lunchtime dealings. Copper is down more than 7% in the past week.
Official customs data from China, responsible for some 45% of global copper consumption, show the country’s refined copper imports in April dropped by 30% to 300,000 tonnes compared to the previous month. Year-on-year import volumes fell by a third. For the whole of 2016 imports were at record levels of 4.95 million tonnes.
Concentrate imports declined by 16.6% to 1.36m tonnes in April from the March total, but is still nearly 8% higher than the same period last year. 2016 was a banner year with volumes gaining 28% over 2015 hitting an all-time high of 16.96 million tonnes for the full year.
Chinese imports compare to global mined production of an estimated 20.5 million tonnes per year.
2 Comments
Pat Woods
China increasing concentrate imports at the expense of refined exports.
Should be obvious why………lots of new smelter capacity, and a burning desire by Chinese to capture more of the overall revenue stream in conversion of copper concentrate to refined product.
Probably not anything to start shrieking about…………like Goldman Sachs or Barclays so often do regarding their oft false protestations about the health of the worldwide copper mining industry.
Toby Arnold
The rise now June -August is largely artificial. I just dumped mine and will take my gains even if I am a bit early dumping. I was holding out in March- May and worried that I had made a mistake when the price was close but not equal to what I was holding back $-wise. Higher ups were very pleased especially since last year at this time, I was pissing everyone off with my reluctance to sell