Is Chinese copper demand faltering? For the hundreds of miners, smelters, fabricators, bankers and hedge fund managers gathered this week for the industry’s big annual conference in Santiago, that is a market-moving question.
After an impressive bull run that has taken copper to all-time highs of more than $10,000 a tonne, inventories of the red metal are piling up in Chinese warehouses.
Prices have fallen 5 per cent from their peak in February. The issue is whether the world’s most voracious copper consumer has been using less copper, or whether smelters and manufacturers further down the supply chain have been running down stocks in the hope of lower prices.