Most operations folks throughout the world have studied up on the famous teachings of Edward Deming (known as the Quality Guru), who has become synonymous with “The Toyota Way.” Despite a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami that tempered Japanese GDP, both Toyota and Honda have maintained their No. 1 and No. 2 rankings just in [...]
Widespread expectations that rising power costs and a falling aluminum price would force smelter closures and hence support the price have so far proved ill-founded. Power costs have remained high, even though oil prices have come off a little, and smelters (particularly in China) were estimated to be below the cost curve as the primary [...]
Zinc buyers (and/or metal-with-a-significant-zinc-content buyers) may be forgiven for feeling pretty sanguine about the supply market for the zinc content of their components. Rising LME inventory levels and prices of zinc that have moderated from the highs of last July suggest a market that is comfortably in oversupply, and indeed the International Lead and Zinc [...]
Continued from Part One. In contrast, consumers of tin (arguably a market much more in balance than oversupplied aluminum) are not facing high spot delivery premiums because mills are keeping the market well-supplied with direct deliveries, said to be at premiums for high-grade tin over the LME cash price of $625 to $650 a ton, [...]
by Stuart Burns on May 10, 2012
Style: Market Analysis
Category: Commodities, Inventory Stock Levels, Investing Hedging, Non-ferrous Metals
Keywords: Aluminum, aluminum prices, base metal premiums, Copper, copper prices, LME, Nickel, Tin
Metals buyers are an assiduous lot, carefully tracking and recording the price movement of those base metals on which the materials and components their firm depends with admirable diligence. Ask a metals buyer for the current copper price and he will often have the number to within a cent per pound off the top of [...]
The nickel market, as Reuters points out in a recent article, has been characterized by two supply-side factors, even as demand has risen. On the one hand, Chinese nickel pig iron (NPI) production has kept the country well supplied in refined nickel, in spite of a falling nickel price supposedly putting cost pressures on the [...]
Continued from Part One. Total registered tonnage of lead in Europe today stands at 101,025 tons, of which 60 percent, or 60,575 tons, is in the form of canceled warrants. The ratio in Spain is 85% and that in Italy is 95%. Where it is going remains a mystery, but Reuters points the finger at [...]
You would have thought after the Sumitomo Copper Scandal in the 1990s the LME and the UK supervisory authorities would have clamped down on market manipulation, but it would seem on the face of it to be as serious as ever. Over the last few weeks we have written about aluminum and copper, and now [...]
