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[caption id="attachment_69986" align="alignleft" width="262"] The latest on China's currency value affecting copper, other commodity prices[/caption] Copper prices have gone the way of aluminum and crude oil. Chinese trade data confirmed the expectation that demand will "remain slack" in the Far East nation, according to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal. Citing data from China Customs, the news source reported that national exports dropped 8.3% in July, year-over-year. Get your 30-day forecasts for aluminum, copper, nickel, lead, zinc, tin and steel (HRC, CRC, HDG, plate) from our new Monthly Metal Buying Outlook report. This data also confirmed that imports fell for the ninth consecutive month, to 8.1% in July, year-over-year. This was a whole 2 percentage points higher than the year-over-year decline seen in June (6.1%). "As long as China worries, eurozone woes and dollar strength dominate the headlines,...
Part of the reason China’s economy has slowed is as a result of deliberate policy actions taken by Beijing to steer it from investment-led, export-orientated manufacturing toward a model based much more on domestic consumption. Free Sample Report: Our Annual Metal Buying Outlook The result has not been great for resource companies or economies around the world, but it will, in the long run, be a more sustainable model for China, and indeed for the world. China’s super-cycle was unsustainable in the medium- to longer-term, the sooner it was curtailed the lower the long-term fallout was likely to be. But there is another reason investment growth has slowed, not just in China but in virtually all emerging markets and that is because the US and other mature economies have on the whole reined in quantitative easing. An article in the...
Last month, my colleague Kyle Fitzsimmons gave us a heads up on the closure due to low zinc prices of the Moorseboro, N.C., smelter operated by Horsehead Holdings. Moorseboro is just one of a string of smelter and mine closures in the last year that have contributed to a gradually tightening zinc market. Free Download: The February 2016 MMI Report Yes, yes — before you wail — we have heard that the Zinc market was supposed to be on the cusp of tightening for the last two years yet large exchange stocks in New Orleans and falling prices have shown that there has been ample supply. [caption id="attachment_77247" align="alignnone" width="300"] Source: Thomson Reuters[/caption] The tightening story started with the announcement some years back that Vedanta would be closing its Lisheen mine in Ireland and MMG would be closing the giant...
The picture for copper wasn’t pretty last month, with the crisis in China leading to a six-year price low for the red metal. But a recovery is already underway, thanks in part to a resurgence in stocks and a number of mine closures that will surely tighten the market for the foreseeable future. Just last week, Glencore announced...
The European debt crisis is doing much more than depressing investors’ appetites for risk and savers’ rates of deposit interest – it is causing major long-term harm to Europe’s manufacturing capability. Caterpillar became the latest American firm to announce major job losses and rationalization at its European operations. The firm plans to cut 1,400 jobs...
Continued from Part Two. Not only has the environment garnered more public attention, the government recognizes that China also can’t continue to consume such vast amounts of power. So, commitments have been made to putting a ceiling on energy consumption. Where exactly that ceiling will be — as a population of 1 billion buys air...
Have you ever gone to Google to look for opinions of where prices might go for a particular material, component, or assembly to better time a purchase order? Have you ever placed a forward buy because you thought prices might increase in the next weeks or months – but then after executing a forward buy,...
The famous saying, as Maine goes, so goes the nation may not aptly describe the current state of politics but we can’t help but still feel that all eyes are on China. So the question we ask is this, as China goes, does America go with it? And as my grandmother used to say when...
Norsk Hydro has decided to “increase capital expenditure by almost 40 percent next year to modernise equipment in expectation of accelerating global demand over the next decade,” reports Reuters. “The company’s optimism was tinted with caution, however, as it introduced the latest in a string of cost-cutting programmes after the global economic downturn hit industries...
Earlier this week we wrote about the greater volatility and higher prevailing prices of copper compared to steel and aluminum, expanding on an article by Morningstar. Today we want to draw on some analysis the same article made regarding the impact substitution of one metal for another will have on demand in the years ahead....
Maybe of more consequence than aluminum financing deals, as we mentioned in Part One, is the structural shift in the supply side that has taken place. As the FT points out, where copper and iron ore have been driven by a surge in Chinese demand, aluminum has been driven by a surge in Chinese production. A...
When I began researching a post a couple years ago about beer and brewing equipment, I distinctly remember my first Google search. I remember that it began and ended with Alibaba. What I don’t remember is exactly which search term or terms I entered (“brewing equipment”? “copper brew kettles”? “stainless fermenting tanks?”), or whether I...
You should credit them for trying. As one of the first foreign multinationals to invest in the Indian market, General Motors has been persevering for over 20 years. Two-Month Trial: Metal Buying Outlook This month, however, it has finally pulled the plug, announcing that it will stop making cars in India for the Indian market by...
This first installment in the search for undervalued metals in wedding bands dovetails quite nicely with a recent post on palladium’s outlook. Dips and dives in the auto industry, the largest end-user of platinum and palladium, are key considerations when looking at prices. Especially important is keeping an eye on whether profits will be rising...
The sense of depression among Indian corporations is positively palpable; an economy that was zipping along at a fast clip just two years ago is now mired by indecision and negativity. Investment decisions are for the most part being postponed and government is tinkering around the edges of reform as the rupee slides lower by...
Not so long ago, my colleague penned a piece on the nickel market with the apt description of it looking like a sick man. In most respects, that outlook remains intact. In fact, August had the most number of days of record LME nickel stocks. However, a couple of recent developments have us wondering if...
We spend quite a bit of time here at MetalMiner analyzing metal price trends to better understand not only what moves markets, but also where anomalies may exist and what that means for metal buying organizations. One trend that continues to trouble us involves the poor price performance of the rare earth metals sector. It...
UC Rusal Chief Executive Oleg Deripaska appealed to the new owners of the London Metal Exchange (LME), Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx), to think again on their proposals to force aluminum warehouses to release more metal than they take in, according to a recent Reuters article, saying “the intent of the HKEx to accelerate...
Advances in brain cancer treatments, to an outsider, look a lot like watching a snail race. Identifying either a cure or a means of making something like a GBM (Glioblastoma) or a DIPG (diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma) manageable, seems like a long way off, particularly if one knows someone given such a diagnosis. And yet,...
One of our men on the ground in China left a message on my cell phone Sunday night, “Lisa I have to discuss a US import issue with you.” Hmm I thought, it seemed a little dire. I wondered what this was going to be about. I awoke to an urgent email, “As you know,...