The commodity’s resilience in recent weeks even as trade tensions flared is a boon for global miners including Rio Tinto Group, BHP Billiton Ltd. and Vale SA, all of which reported bumper production figures this week.
Nobody who owns a copper mine wants to give it up. Even when Glencore and Anglo American Plc were crippled by debt during the 2015 commodity slump, neither was willing to entertain an offer from Rio for their holdings in the giant Collahuasi deposit in Chile.
A common target for the thieves is Antofagasta Plc’s logistics unit Grupo FCAB, which owns and operates about 700 kilometers of railway lines used to transport cathode and semi-processed copper.
Thieves leap from trucks onto trains as they roll through Chile’s Atacama Desert, before throwing 80-kilo slabs of copper to the ground and disappearing.
The U.S. election of Donald Trump lit a fire under metals markets in 2016 as investors took a liking to his pro-business agenda. Now, copper and other metals are tanking as Trump’s trade war against China threatens to derail economic growth.