The first half copper price recovery trend is obvious

    The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has released the operation of China's copper industry in the first half of 2020.In the first half of 2020, China's copper industry maintained a stable operation, the trend of copper price recovery was obvious, refined copper inventory decreased, and the decline in the industry benefit narrowed.

    First, the steady growth of output, refined copper inventories have declined.From January to June, the content of copper concentrate was 800,000 tons, up 8.4% year on year, and the output of refined copper and copper materials was 4.82 million tons and 9.4 million tons, up 4.6% and 6.1% year on year respectively.Copper inventories stood at 285,000 tons in late July, down 47% from the year's high, according to industry analysts.

    Second, the price stage recovery, the benefit decline narrowed.Since April, copper prices have gradually recovered, with the average spot price of copper in June at 46,772 yuan/ton, up 12.4% from the average price in March.From January to June, the profit of the copper industry was 10.91 billion yuan, down 31.9% year on year, especially the profit in June was 3.19 billion yuan, up 10.4% year on year, which reduced the decline of profit in the first half year by 9.3 percentage points compared with that in January to May.The profits of copper mining, copper smelting and copper rolling processing from January to June were 2.58 billion yuan, 4.02 billion yuan and 4.31 billion yuan respectively, down by 6.9%, 37% and 37.4% compared with the same period last year. The declines of profits of smelting and rolling processing were 21.6% and 6.7%, respectively, narrower than those from January to May.

    Third, imports of copper products and exports of copper material year-on-year growth, exports of refined copper decline.From January to June, the imports of copper concentrate (physical quantity), crude copper and copper materials were 10.84 million tons, 422,000 tons and 240,000 tons respectively, with year-on-year increases of 3%, 15.3% and 4.6%.Influenced by the weakness of copper price and domestic demand, the import volume of refined copper increased considerably, with the import volume of 1.84.4m tons from January to June, up 24% year-on-year.Imported copper scrap 430,000 tons, down 49.6% year on year.From January to June, 261,000 tons of copper products were exported, up 1.4% year-on-year, and 123,000 tons of refined copper products were exported, down 32.2% year-on-year