After a bounce following the US-China trade rapprochement, temporary though it may turn out to be, copper was on the back foot again mid-week. The most active copper futures contract on Comex was down 1.8% in lunchtime trade, falling to $4.639 per pound, the equivalent of $10,220 a tonne. Like other markets, the copper price has been on a wild ride in 2025, hitting all-time highs at the end of March only to come dangerously close to crashing through $4.00 barely a fortnight later. Year to date the orange metal remains up nearly 16%. In a note RBC Dominion Securities draws attention to the fact that growth in China’s copper concentrate imports of close to 3 million tonnes hit a five year high in April after increasing by 24% compared to the same month last year. The shipments come despite negative treatment charges – what miners pay to smelters to process concentrate. Spot fees have been negative since December and last Friday hit an unprecedented –$57.50 a tonne. Chinese smelters feasted on renewed concentrate exports from Freeport’s Grasberg mine after the US company received the necessary permits from Indonesian authorities and an outage at a Glencore smelter in the Philippines saw cargoes rerouted to China. Freeport’s in-country smelter should be operational by September, cutting off one source of supply for Chinese smelters which had built out capacity at a breakneck pace in recent years. At the same time RBC says Shanghai inventories continue to fall, with stockpiles at 89,000 at the end of April, down nearly 150,000 tonnes in just one month.RBC believes while the US-China trade deal still needs to be worked out and it is too early to fully assess the impact on global growth the agreement “could be a step toward reducing the economic risk and would allow the positive fundamentals for copper to resurface.”The investment bank also says equity valuations remain attractive pointing to Capstone Copper, Hudbay Minerals, Ivanhoe Mines, and First Quantum Minerals as its preferred producers. FQM’s Cobre Panama mine looks closer to being reopened after more than 18 months on care and maintenance after the Central American’s nation’s president said the government is looking at “partnership models” to bring the massive mine back into production.
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