While Dr Copper waits for China, China buys more copper
Doctor Copper has started the new year with a fresh spring in his step as investors bet on a powerful demand boost from China's post-COVID reopening.Get more news about
copper spring in china,you can vist our website!
London Metal Exchange (LME) three-month metal is currently trading at $9,345, up 12% on the start of January, with funds jumping back into copper as a proxy for the China recovery story.The country's net imports of refined copper totalled 3.64 million tonnes last year, an increase of almost 300,000 tonnes on 2021 and the second highest tally after the record-breaking year of 2020.
Imports of mined concentrates, meanwhile, notched up a new annual record of 25.32 million tonnes and those of copper scrap were the highest since 2018.
The mystery is where all this metal has gone since visible inventories within China remain historically low.
The strength of last year's imports was even more surprising given the financial problems at privately-owned Maike Group.
One of China's top import channels abruptly halted all its copper purchases in the summer of 2022 after it ran out of cash to pay suppliers.
This has created a ripple effect of supply shortages and higher premiums for users in the Shanghai area and Guangdong province, where Maike was a particularly powerful player.Nor has there been any surge in arrivals of unwanted Russian metal such as seen in aluminium. China's imports of primary aluminium leapt by 59% last year as metal was redirected from Western markets. But China's imports of Russian copper actually fell by 20% to 324,000 tonnes in 2022.
Last year's refined metal import boom was mirrored in the raw materials markets, with record inflows of copper concentrate and a 5% increase in imports of recyclable copper.
Tighter purity thresholds introduced in 2021 mean that last year's 1.77 million tonnes of scrap imports contained a lot more copper than the historical norm.
While shipments from Europe and the United States have bounced back from the low levels of 2020, when the Chinese government was threatening an outright ban on scrap imports, those from Hong Kong have collapsed. The authorities appear to have closed what was for many years a back door for lower-grade material.
