Yangzhou Baosheng Copper Industry, a large Chinese manufacturer of wire and cable, announced on 12th December that it had placed an order with Germany's SMS Meer for a CONTIROD system to be installed at its plant in Baoying, Jiangsu province. The new system, which has a capacity of 48t/h, will come into action in 2014 and will enable the company to expand its range of products.
Guangyuan Copper Co., a Chinese producer of oxygen-free copper wirerod, announced on 25th December that it has fully opened its new facility based in the Yingtan Hi-Tech Industry Zone in Jiangsu, China. The new facility, which has been running on a trial basis since September 2012, is expected to produce 10,000t/y of high purity oxygen free copper wirerod.
According to data from the Jiangxi Commission of Industry and Information, 2012 output of copper semis in the Chinese province of Jiangxi was 2.09Mt, a 24.5% increase on 2011. According to the Commission there are 286 copper companies with revenue above RMB5M (US$795,000) in Jiangxi, including China's largest integrated smelter and semis producer Jiangxi Copper Co.
Chinalco Shanghai Copper Co, a subsidiary of China Aluminium Group Corporation, will produce 45,000t of flat-rolled copper plate and strip in 2013, according to a source from the company. The company has copper plate and strip production capacity of around 70,000t/y according to Antaike, suggesting a utilisation rate of around 64% for the year. Chinalco Shanghai Copper Co also produces copper foil at its Baoshan-based production facility and currently has a capacity of 20,000t/y.
According to an annual survey from Antaike, operating rates at Chinese copper fabricators were on average 2.66 percentage points lower in 2012 than in 2011. The sector that saw the largest slow down in utilisation was the copper tube sector, down 7.27 percentage points in 2012, due to low operating rates in air conditioner sector denting the demand for copper tube in China. Wire manufacturers and foil manufacturers were reported to have fared better in 2012, with utilisation rates rising modestly.
Henan-based Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube (Henan Golden Dragon), the world's largest manufacturer of commercial copper tube, will open a new 30,000t/y high precision copper tube factory in July 2013. Henan Golden Dragon begun production of the facility in May 2012 and have invested a total of RMB 380M (USD60.5M). The factory will produce high precision copper tube.
The firm Tanaka Denshi Kogyo, of the Tanaka Kikinzoku Group, has announced it is to expand its output of copper bonding wire to 20 million metres per month, a five-fold increase. The increase will come from an additional production line at the firm's Singapore plant which produces copper bonding wire and from establishing a new production line at the Saga plant in Japan.
The company forecasts that the global bonding wire market could double between 2008 and 2010. Copper bonding wire demand could also strengthen as it is a substitute for gold bonding wire, and therefore will benefit whilst the gold price remain high.
Tanaka Denshi Kogyo has also recently begun the sale of a new copper bonding wire, TCA1. The firm said that TCA1 is copper wire with a 99.99% purity and a diameter of between 20-70 micrometres. It's price is around a third that of gold bonding wire.
Honeywell (NYSE: HON) Electronic Materials announced today it will more than double its refining and casting capacity for high-purity copper and tin at its Spokane, Wash., facility in response to rising demand in the semiconductor industry.
The company said the process involves crushing a vehicle’s wiring assembly and sorting the copper by examining differences in buoyancy and using magnets. The recycling technology produces copper with a purity of 99.96 percent that can be reused in new automobiles, Toyota said.