EUROPEAN MORNING BRIEF 04/12: Rio Tinto appoints next chairman; KGHM interview; Shanghai bonded stocks

Base metal prices on the Shanghai Futures Exchange were mostly higher during Asian morning trading on Monday, with copper rising amid short-covering.

The most-traded January copper contract on the SHFE stood at 53,450 yuan ($8,076) per tonne as of 11.30am Shanghai time, up by 550 yuan from last Friday’s close, with around 180,000 lots changing hands so far.

Check Metal Bulletin’s live futures report here.

Rio Tinto has appointed Simon Thompson as chairman, the company announced on Monday. Thompson, who joined the Rio Tinto board as a non-executive director in 2014, will become chairman on March 5, 2018.

Polish copper miner KGHM expects to produce around 120,000 tonnes of copper at its Sierro Gorda mine next year, the company’s president and chief executive officer Radoslaw Domagalski-Labedzki told Metal Bulletin in an interview during Asia Copper Week in Shanghai last week.

Shanghai bonded zinc stocks rose in November, after a dip in October, on weaker demand due to environmental crackdowns, while copper stocks fell to a 2017 low, according to a Metal Bulletin survey.

Rio Tinto’s Arvida aluminium smelter in the Canadian province of Quebec is reportedly experiencing difficulties with its billet casting, causing a slowdown in billet production, sources told American Metal Market.

Lundin Mining Corp expects its zinc output to fall in 2018 while other companies are ramping up production to take advantage of high zinc prices, although an expansion project is forecast to boost levels in the two subsequent years.

Flat-rolled aluminium manufacturers are encouraged by the US Commerce Department’s decision to self-initiate anti-dumping and countervailing duty investigations into imports of Chinese common alloy aluminium sheet, believing that such tariffs would benefit the domestic market.