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The London Metal Exchange (LME) announced that it launched new Asian Benchmark reference prices for LME copper, LME aluminium, and LME zinc. The exchange said that new unofficial three month futures prices for the above contracts will be published at the end of the Asian trading day. As published on 24th January 2011, the first LME copper Asian Benchmark price was US$9,550.00/t. The LME attributed the introduction of the new benchmark prices to the increasing futures trading volume on LMEselect, the exchange's electronic trading platform, during Asian time zones. It is expected that the new reference prices will provide a transparent view of the sentiment across Asian key metal and financial markets.

Xinxing Zhunguan, a Zhejiang-based manufacturer of copper wirerod, plans to increase production at its facility to 165,000t in 2013, up by 10% from 150,000t in 2012. Despite low profitability at Chinese wirerod producers, an official at the company said Xinxing Zhunguan still plans to increase output in 2013 in order to enhance competitiveness. The company said it expects orders to be subdued in the run up to the Chinese Lunar New Year, but then expects a strong rebound after the holiday period. This is consistent with another report on 11th January from Reuters which cited several Chinese copper traders as expecting the period between now and the holiday to be quiet, followed by a strong rebound.

According to an official from Chinalco Kunming Copper Co., the Chinese wirerod manufacturer, the company produced 10,000t of copper wirerod in March, up from 7,000t in February. The official said that March's output of wirerod had risen because of a week-long shutdown in February for the Chinese New Year. However, output had still fallen short of the company's 13,000t target. Chinalco Kunming plans to produce 150,000t of wirerod in 2013, utilising around 68% of its 220,000t/y capacity. According to a report from Asian Metal, the company has recently settled its long-term charges for processing 8.0mm wirerod at RMB1,150/t (US$183/t).

Wirerod production at Hebei Dawufeng Copper has been temporarily suspended since early April in order to carry out maintenance. The company elected to halt production for a month in order to carry out equipment maintenance, owing to the currently sluggish wirerod market. Production at the plant, which has a wirerod production capacity of 100,000 t/y is scheduled to re-start in early May.

Aurubis AG, the Germany-headquartered refined copper cathode and copper products fabricator, reported a weak performance in sales of copper products in the first quarter of this year. In Q1, the outputs of wirerod; pre-rolled strip; continuous cast shapes; rolled products and speciality wire reached 179,000t, 41,000t, 47,000t and 60,000t, down by 17% y-o-y, down by 15% y-o-y, up by 2% y-o-y and up by 329% y-o-y, respectively. Generally, the seasonal upswing in Q2 was weaker than expected, however, there was a mixture of performances in the sectors within each market, as some wirerod market sectors ordered strongly but European semi-fabricators and customers of strip and speciality wire continued to order shrinking quantities at late notice.

Aurubis reported a growth outlook for its copper products business unit. The company said that the performance of copper wirerod depends upon the progress of power grid expansion projects in Europe. The automotive sector is expected to continue to support growing wirerod sales for the next few months, however the enamelled wire industry is expected to remain weak attributed to poor demand in southern Europe. North American demand is anticipated to support growth in shipments of copper shapes as well as the company's market for flat copper products. In this regard, the US electronics and electrical industry, engine cooling and distribution segments are expected to continue improving. Stagnant European and Asian demand for flat copper products will partially undermine growth in North America. The company added that it does not anticipate the Asian copper products market to recover until the end of Summer 2012, at which time, demand in the US is expected to be good and demand from European-based operations will be recovering.

The Chilean state-owned copper firm Nacional del Cobre (Codelco) is seeking a joint venture with Chinese company MinMetals to explore minerals in African and Asian countries.

Instead, America's consumption binge drew support from two major asset bubbles-property and credit. Courtesy of cheap and freely available credit, in conjunction with record housing price appreciation, consumers tripled the rate of net equity extraction from their homes, from 3 percent of disposable personal income in 2001 to 9 percent in 2006. Only by levering increasingly overvalued homes could Americans go on the biggest consumption binge in modern history. And now those twin bubbles-property and credit-have burst, and so has the US consumption bubble: real consumer spending fell at an unprecedented 3.5 percent average annual rate in the two final quarters of 2008. While the original excesses were made in America, the rest of the world was delighted to go along for the ride. With the United States lacking in internal saving, it had to import surplus savings from abroad in order to grow-and ran massive current-account and trade deficits to attract that capital. This fit perfectly with the macro-imbalances of the export-led developing countries of Asia, whose exports exceeded a record 45 percent of regional GDP in 2007-fully ten percentage points higher than their share ten years earlier, in the depths of the Asian financial crisis. China led the charge, taking its exports from 20 percent, to 40 percent of its GDP over the past seven years alone. The export-led growth in developing Asia could well be described as a second-order bubble-in effect, a derivative of the one in US consumption.

A report today from CIBC World Markets says the skyrocketing cost of transportation is leading to inflation and taking away the edge that many Asian countries have had in offering cheap labour.

LS Cable may see a 5% y-o-y fall in its copper consumption in the current year. This will be the second consecutive year that copper consumption dropped, as the company already experienced a 5% y-o-y plunge in 2008 to 270,000t. Copper accounts for about 30% of the company's production costs. LS Cable has announced that it is focusing on higher value added products such as underground and extra high-voltage cables in developing regions including the Middle East, China and other Asian countries.

Luvata, a major copper semis fabricator, announced that it expects a 10% rise in sales in 2011 on the back of strong Asian demand. The company expects sales of around 335,500t of copper semis this year, in comparison to 305,000t in 2010. In 2010, Luvata achieved sales growth of 19.6% y-o-y. The company believes that copper demand is recovering well, with robust growth in China and South East Asia, where the residential construction, manufacturing and electrical engineering sectors are performing strongly.

"Vietnam is one of the few countries in the Southeast Asian region that has established regulatory bodies in the power sector. In 2004, the Electricity Reform Law was introduced to establish a competitive electricity market in the country. Reforms were initiated in 2012 and agencies such as the Directorate General of Energy (DGE) under the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT) and Electricity Regulatory Authority of Vietnam (ERAV) restricted the control and ownership of transmission grid and power generation of Vietnam Electricity (EVN)."

"Almost half of global investment in new electricity generation last year was in renewables, thanks to a hike in investment by developing countries, says a UN report."

Toyota Motor Corporation announced on 5th November a sharp increase in H1 2012 revenues of 36.1% y-o-y compared with the same period in 2011. The increase was largely due to base effects associated with last year's Japanese earthquake and tsunami. As part of the announcement, Toyota revised up their annual profit forecasts to JPY1.05T from JPY1.0T (US$13.29B from US$12.66B). However, Toyota revised down overall expected 2012/13 car sales by 50,000 units. This was driven by downward revisions to Asian and European sales forecasts, 50,000 and 40,000 units, to 1.73M and 790,000 units respectively. North America was a bright spot for Toyota, with expectations for full year North American automobile sales revised up by 20,000 units to 2.4M vehicles.

Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd., the Japanese integrated cablemaking company, announced plans to build a new copper wirerod plant in Thailand. The facility will add 17,000t/m of capacity to the company's current 20,000t/m, which is split between rod mills in Japan and Indonesia. Sumitomo intends to supply copper wirerod primarily for downstream processing into automotive wire harnesses and electric motors in order to meet growing demand from the emerging South East Asian car markets.