South Africa will enter a 21-day nationwide lockdown from midnight on Thursday March 26 and ordered the country’s metals and mining operations to be placed on care and maintenance.

If global financial markets had been operating under a pervading sense of uncertainty due to the impact of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), they now appear to be veering on panic.

The continued unpredictability of trade relations between China and the United States has made long-term planning harder for businesses, including mining companies.

US regulators may get powers to conduct oversight and investigate price-reporting and price-setting entities in the aluminium markets if recently introduced legislation becomes law.

Investors keen to tap into the electrification of the world’s transport networks should look upstream to the battery metals market instead of buying shares in automakers, according to Ulrich Ernst, the chief executive officer of Blackstone Resources.

The aluminium market in the United States remains structurally short in spite of a series of recently introduced trade policies designed to benefit domestic producers, according to a senior executive at Vedanta.

Gécamines is to invite all of its joint venture partners to discuss the terms and conditions of their mining contracts with it in an effort to restructure them, the chairman of the Congolese state-run company said.

Global trader Glencore plans to resume royalty payments to a former business partner in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), ending a legal dispute that could have resulted in severe disruption to its copper and cobalt mining operations.

Producing and then trading metal used to be the purview of just a few, with the supply chain more typically separated into silos and companies making occasional forays into different areas.