Chile’s year-end copper windfall signals mines are recovering
Chile’s copper export revenue jumped in December, despite lower prices for the metal.
Chilean miner Antofagasta and Jiangxi Copper have agreed significantly lower copper concentrate processing fees for 2025, four sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Thursday.
The agreement between Antofagasta and Jiangxi Copper for treatment and refining charges (TC/RCs) of $21.25 a ton and 2.125 cents per pound represents a drop of 73.4% from the $80/8 cents industry benchmark for 2024, a sign of concerns about sufficient availability of copper concentrate in the spot market in 2025.
Antofagasta declined to comment. Jiangxi Copper was not immediately available for comment.
The fees, known as treatment and refining charges (TC/RCs), a key source of revenue for smelters, paid by miners when they sell concentrate, or semi-processed ore, to be refined into metal.
The charges tend to fall when ore supply declines and rise when more concentrate is available.
The fees agreed are lower than estimates in a Reuters poll of industry participants last month, where charges were seen at a 15-year-low – between the high-$20s and mid-$30s a ton.
The first agreement between global copper miners and smelters in China, the world’s dominant processor, has often set a benchmark for fees of other industry players in recent years.
However, this year, according to one of the sources, other Chinese smelters are willing to negotiate their own fees with slight changes to that reached between Antofagasta and Jiangxi.
In the spot market, copper concentrate supply has tightened this year due to unexpected mine operations disruptions and rising smelting capacity, and the tightness is expected to persist in 2025.
The copper concentrate deficit is expected to widen to 950,000 tons in 2025 from 1,600 tons in 2024, according to analysts at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence (BMI).
(Editing by David Evans)
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