The lead and zinc industry ran smoothly in the first half of the year

    A few days ago, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the operation of the lead and zinc industry in the first half of 2020.In the first half of the year, China's lead and zinc industry production remained stable, the price bottomed out, the decline in industry benefit narrowed.

    First, smelting output year-on-year growth, the downstream consumption gradually warmer.From January to June of 2020, the output of lead and zinc concentrate was 545,000 tons and 1.206 million tons, with year-on-year growth of 1.9% and -1%.The output of lead and zinc was 2.767 million tons and 3.048 million tons, up 4.4% and 7.7% year-on-year.Among them, the output of reclaimed lead was 1.229 million tons, up 5.5% year on year.The output of reclaimed zinc reached 299,000 tons, up 6.8% year-on-year.From January to June, the output of lead-acid batteries, the main application product of lead, was 96.356 million kVa/h, up by 6.1% year on year and up from the first quarter.The output of zinc coating plate, the main application product of zinc, was 27,088 thousand tons, down 0.3% year on year and 2.4 percentage points less than that of the first quarter.

    Second, the bottom of the price rise, the decline in efficiency has narrowed.Since April 2020, the prices of lead and zinc have risen month-on-month. The average spot prices of lead and zinc in June were 14,455 yuan/ton and 17,707 yuan/ton, up 2.6% and 13.1% respectively from the average prices in March.The lead and zinc industry realized a profit of 4.6 billion yuan, down 38.8% year-on-year, and realized a profit of 1.91 billion yuan in June, up 33.6% year-on-year, which reduced the drop in benefit from January to June by 17 percentage points compared with that from January to May.Among them, the profit of lead-zinc mining was 3.05 billion yuan, and the profit of lead-zinc smelting industry was 1.55 billion yuan.

    Third, the import of lead and zinc concentrate diverged, and the export of lead-acid batteries declined year-on-year.From January to June of 2020, the substitution effect of recycled lead raw materials for lead concentrate was evident. The import of lead concentrate was 558,000 tons, down 25.9% year on year, while the import of zinc concentrate was 2.03 million tons, up 42.4% year on year.Imports of refined lead and zinc were 14,000 tons and 223,000 tons respectively, down 79.2% and 33.4% year on year.From January to June, 73.03 million lead-acid batteries were exported from China, a year-on-year decrease of 7.4%.