Indonesia’s Jan-Oct nickel ore imports surge by 50 times from year ago
The world's biggest nickel producer has bought record volumes of the ore from the Philippines since April.
The London Metal Exchange (LME) will hold an independent review into a wild spike in nickel pricesthat forced a shutdown earlier this month, a top executive said on Tuesday.
The LME suspended nickel trading on March 8 after prices rocketed by more than 50% in a matter of hours to hit $100,000 a tonne. Trading resumed on March 16.
“We’ll undertake an independent review and if there are other lessons to be learned, we’ll adopt those as well,” Adrian Farnham, the chief executive of the LME’s clearing house, told the CRU-CESCO World Copper Conference in Santiago.
The LME, the world’s oldest and largest market for industrial metals, launched daily price limits for the first time on outright contracts when it restarted nickel trading.
The surge in prices that triggered the halt was blamed on short-covering by one of the world’s top producers, China’s Tsingshan Holding Group.
The LME, owned by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd, has said that the large short positions in nickel originated primarily from the over-the-counter (OTC) market.
The 145-year-old exchange also started requiring participants to report OTC positions when it resumed nickel activity.
Farnham will take over as LME interim CEO in May from Matthew Chamberlain who said in January he would step down.
(By Eric Onstad; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
Comments