Copper end use trends

Sterlite Industries, India's largest metals producer, has said it is to buy the operating assets of bankrupt US copper miner Asarco for $1.7bn, nearly $1bn less than the price it had agreed in November last year.

The global recession has arrived in Zambia's Copper Belt.

Prysmian Cables & Systems said it expects its Chinese sales volumes to increase by 50% by 2010, an increase which has been aided by the opening of the company's fifth production plant in China. The company's sales increased by 16% year-on-year in 2007 and said that further growth opportunities were linked to the development of new infrastructure for energy and communications. Prysmian's new plant will be based in Tianjin and is expected to have an annual capacity of 10,000tpy including special cables for e.g. rail networks, mining and windfarms.

Prysmian S.p.A has announced its sales results for 2008. Sales amounted to Euro 5,144 million, exhibiting a 4.2% y-o-y organic growth. Adjusted EBITDA reached Euro 542 million, with a sales margin of 10.5% compared to 10.3% in 2007. Adjusted net income was Euro 332 million, up by 11% y-o-y. The group achieved strong performance in its utilities business, which grew by 12.1% y-o-y. This is attributed to positive performance of high voltage underground and submarine cables. The trade and installers business contracted by 5% due to the slowdown in the construction industry. Industrial cables exhibited organic growth of 5% mainly because of positive performance in the oil and gas, and renewable energy sectors.

Mr Obama's stimulus includes calls for $38bn in direct government spending and $18bn in tax breaks for clean energy spread over the next 10 years, according to Dewey & LeBoeuf, the law firm. Owners of solar, wind, and other clean energy facilities will be able to claim tax credits against the cost of new equipment, helping attract big institutional investors who have been put off investing in clean energy because of uncertainty about taxes. But the short timeframe - credits can only be claimed for projects that are up and running within the next three to four years - means projects still on the drawing board may not be ready in time to qualify.

China's copper consumption will rise in 2009 but growth will slow from 2008, Li Yihuang, president of Jiangxi Copper group, said on Thursday. "I feel this year's copper consumption growth should very closely track the country's gross domestic product growth," Li told reporters in Beijing.

NEW DELHI: Riding on the back of improved performances and demand from the automobile and construction sectors, consumption of steel increased by 5.7 per cent to 4.45 million tonnes in February indicating a revival in demand, according to official sources.

Polycab Wires will set up a 50:50 joint venture with Nexans to establish a manufacturing unit in Gujarat. The plant will specialise in the production of elastomeric and extra high voltage (EHV) cables. R. S. Vaidyanathan, president and CEO of Polycab Wires, said that the demand for EHV cables in India will soar and few suppliers will be in a position to meet market needs. He also remarked that the power transmission business in India has not been impacted by the slowdown due to orders placed by the public sector.

Fujian Nanping Sun Cable Co., Ltd. has announced that it will build a 100ktpy copper wirerod project in Shanghang. The company, a cable manufacturer established in 1958, has signed an agreement with the government of the county. The investment will amount to 180 million yuan. According to plans the first stage will be complete by September with output capacity of 30ktpy of 8mm copper wirerod and other wire products. Upon completion of the second stage production capacity will reach 100ktpy.

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.

Global miner Rio Tinto expects 2009 to be a rough year in terms of both prices and volumes for key commodities, the firm's chief economist said on Wednesday

China imported 180,500 tons of refined copper in January, up 41.3 percent on year. And the import volume of last December hit a high of 211,500 tons.

The way electric power is generated and distributed will change substantially over the next two decades. Power will be democratized, as small-scale production at the individual and community level moves from niche to normal. The resulting "electron-democracy" will still have centralized power plants, but power grid activity will increasingly be dominated by innumerable incremental energy flows between small producers and consumers. This is likely to happen whether or not public policy mandates a shift away from dependence on fossil fuels.

The lab has a lofty vision: "Enable one person to invent and run the next revolutionary IT service, operationally expressing a new business idea as a multi-million-user service over the course of a long weekend."

Chinese refined copper imports in January amounted to 180,500 tonnes, up by 41.3% y-o-y. Copper scrap imports in January declined by 56.2% y-o-y to 184,400 tonnes gross weight. The consumption side of the red metal remains weak as all the major copper consuming industries are in decline. Building construction, the electronics industry, as well as the automotive sector are suffering due to the economic slowdown. As for the power industry, the Chinese government has allocated a 1 trillion yuan package for power grid investment in the next three years.

Standard & Poor has announced that it placed credit ratings for Wolverine Tube Inc. on CreditWatch. The decision includes its 'CC' corporate credit rating and 'C' senior unsecured debt. Wolverine Tube announced its decision regarding an exchange offer of senior notes due 2009 for new ones due 2012. Given the current market conditions and the financial position of the company, this decision raises default risk levels. Standard & Poor will monitor the exchange offer.

"Thanks to the low cost and the broad deployment of copper cabling in the datacenter, we believe 10GBASE-T will help accelerate the adoption of 10GbE. 10GBASE-T is available today in adapters and will certainly migrate to be the standard connection on the motherboard."

India's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research released a study this week that says e-waste is growing at a rate of 10 percent a year in India, with 95 percent headed to urban slums for segregating,

Following on from its 2008 report on corporate sustainability, the Economist Intelligence Unit has released a major new research report at its 2009 Sustainability Summit, focusing specifically on climate change and what it means for business. The research was sponsored by the Carbon Trust, KPMG, SAP and Shell.