Copper Prices, Stocks and Market Outlook

How copper is priced per tonne and per pound

Most of the world’s copper trades against three exchange benchmarks. The London Metal Exchange quotes copper in US dollars per metric tonne, and its official price is the reference written into many physical supply contracts. COMEX, part of CME Group in the US, quotes copper futures in US dollars per pound. The Shanghai Futures Exchange quotes in yuan per tonne. To turn a per-tonne price into a per-pound price, divide by 2,204.62, the number of pounds in a metric tonne.

Those benchmarks are for refined cathode, the high-purity sheets that come out of a refinery. Copper sold earlier in the chain is priced off them:

• Concentrate from a mine is paid on the copper it contains, minus treatment and refining charges that go to the smelter. Those charges are negotiated and swing a lot with smelter capacity.
• Ore is rarely sold as such. Its value depends on grade, recovery and the cost of getting it to a mill.
• Scrap trades at a discount to the exchange price that depends on its grade and how clean it is.

Our pieces on the copper price per tonne and on reading an LME official price go into the details, with dated figures.

What moves the copper market

Copper price behavior comes down to a few forces that pull at the same time. On the demand side, construction and electrical networks use the most copper, through wiring, cables, motors and plumbing. Electrification adds to that: electric vehicles, charging networks, wind and solar farms and grid upgrades all use more copper per unit than the systems they replace. China is by far the largest consumer of refined copper, so news about its property market and factory output moves the price.

On the supply side, a few large mines in Chile, Peru, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere produce a big share of the world’s copper, so a strike, a flood or a permit dispute at one of them shows up quickly. Ore grades at many older mines are falling, and a new mine often takes more than a decade to move from discovery to production. Exchange inventories, the US dollar and interest rates add short-term noise on top.

How to read a copper price outlook

Two public forecasts are worth knowing. The World Bank’s Commodity Markets Outlook publishes price forecasts for copper and other metals twice a year. The International Copper Study Group, an intergovernmental body, publishes forecasts of refined copper supply, demand and the expected surplus or deficit, also twice a year. Banks and consultancies publish their own, usually for clients.

When you read any copper market outlook, check three things: the date it was published, the price it started from, and its assumptions about demand from China and new mine supply. A forecast made before a large mine outage or a tariff change can be out of date within weeks. Our summary of what the World Bank and ICSG expect sets their numbers side by side with the dates they were issued.

Kinds of copper mining stocks

Listed copper exposure comes in several forms, and they behave differently:

Chile’s state-owned Codelco is one of the world’s largest copper producers, but it isn’t listed, which is why it appears in output rankings and not in lists of copper shares. Our rankings of the largest copper mining stocks by output and of Canadian copper miners cover the listed producers, and the piece on copper royalty companies explains how royalty income works.

Where new copper comes from

Because new mines take so long to build, the supply side of every outlook depends on what explorers find now. Most copper exploration targets porphyry, sediment-hosted and skarn deposits, and much of the early work is about narrowing a large license to the few spots worth drilling.

That early stage is where our satellite mineral detection service fits. We combine optical, shortwave-infrared, radar, thermal, terrain and magnetic data to rank Exploration Targets across a license, ahead of a JORC or NI 43-101 resource estimate and never as a replacement for one. The copper-cobalt case study shows satellite targets that a later drill hole hit.