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‘Animals spirits’ – instincts and emotions that influence decision-making – have returned to the copper market, delegates heard at the Financial Times Metals and Mining Summit in London on Friday October 10. Gunvor’s global head of base metals, Ivan Petev, said that prices could reach the high teens, potentially as high as $19,000 per tonne. Anglo American’s group head of strategy, Paul Gait, said that applying historical copper/gold ratios to current gold prices would imply a copper price of around $22,000 per tonne — though said Anglo models a range of scenarios.
The London Metal Exchange copper cash price settled at $10,866.25 per tonne on October 9, the highest level since the May 2024 record of more than $11,400 per tonne. Copper prices reached $11,000 per tonne on October 9, but eased slightly to $10,734 per tonne on October 10.
The latest rally was driven by renewed concerns over supply constraints following a series of major mine disruptions.
The International Copper Study Group (ICSG) on October 8 revised downward its 2025 mine production growth forecast to 1.4% from the 2.3% indicated in April, citing “major incidents that negatively affected output at the Grasberg [in Indonesia] and Kamoa [in the Democratic Republic of Congo] mines.”
“Animal spirits have been awoken in the copper market,” Petev said on a panel at the summit. “The Grasberg problem effectively nudged everyone who was already seeing a broadly balanced copper market to [recognizing] the reality of supply definitely underperforming [compared with expectations].”
The supply disruptions included the July 31 accident at Codelco’s El Teniente mine in Chile that resulted in the deaths of six workers and temporarily halted operations.
Petev compared the current market setup to October 2003, when a landslide at the Grasberg mine triggered a multi-year copper rally. “When this setup is evident, you could be talking [about prices rising to the] high teens [of thousands of dollars per tonne],” he said.
Gait offered an even more bullish long-term outlook based on historical price relationships between copper and gold.
“If you look at copper in gold-adjusted terms – the copper-gold ratio – it’s the lowest copper price that we’ve ever seen since 1975,” Gait told the conference. Based on the long-term average copper-gold ratio and current gold prices, “that would imply a copper price of $22,000 per tonne,” he said.
Gait emphasized that while Anglo American produces a range of price scenarios, the historical mean reversion in the copper-gold ratio suggested significant upside potential for copper prices.
“Projects are getting larger and larger” while ore grades decline and operations move deeper underground, he told the summit.
Gold prices have surged above $4,000 per troy ounce for the first time, while the price of silver hit a fresh record high above $50 per troy ounce on October 10 – the first time that silver has reached that high a price since 1980.
The rally in precious metals was providing some relief to copper smelters squeezed by negative treatment charges, industry observers said.
“Record gold and silver prices are helping smelters to cope with low treatment charges,” Will Adams, head of base metals research at Fastmarkets, said. Gold and silver are typically recovered as by-products from copper concentrate processing.
The ICSG, which met in Lisbon on October 7, projected a refined copper surplus of 178,000 tonnes for 2025, followed by a deficit of 150,000 tonnes in 2026. The shift to deficit “is attributed to lower than previously anticipated refined copper production, that will be constrained by the lower availability of copper concentrate,” the group said in its October 8 report.
The intergovernmental body forecast world refined copper production growth of 3.4% in 2025, slowing to just 0.9% in 2026 when “primary electrolytic refined production growth is expected to be limited by the constrained availability of concentrates.”
Meanwhile, apparent refined copper usage was expected to increase by 3% in 2025 and by 2.1% in 2026, the ICSG said, supported by “improvements in manufacturing activity in some of the key copper end-use sectors, continued demand from energy transition, urbanization [and] digitalization [and the creation of data centers].”
Industry executives at the summit pointed to multiple structural challenges constraining copper supply beyond the recent accidents, from declining ore grades to extended project development timelines.
Ian Anderson, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Teck Resources, said that it takes an average of 17 years to develop a mine anywhere on the globe. “Projects are getting larger and larger” with ore grades declining and operations moving deeper underground, he told the summit.
The copper concentrate market has experienced ‘extraordinary’ conditions this year, with treatment charges turning negative, meaning that smelters were effectively paying miners to secure feedstock, Anderson said.Fastmarkets assessed the weekly copper concentrates TC index, cif Asia Pacific – the mid-point between smelter and trader buying levels – at $(66.60) per tonne on October 10. This was down by $1.20 per tonne from $(65.40) per tonne on October 3, the eighth consecutive week to show a decline.
Global copper mine supply was forecast to grow only by about 2.8% this year, while smelter capacity has increased by 8.5%, creating a structural imbalance, Anderson said. “We’ve become accustomed to normalizing negative TCs, and that’s an extraordinary situation. It’s indicative of what’s happening on the scarcity side.”
The mining industry faces headwinds in bringing new copper supply online, with cost overruns and delays plaguing new projects.
Karel Eloot, senior partner at McKinsey & Co, said that the industry needs to invest nearly $5 trillion over the next decade to meet surging demand for copper and other critical minerals.
But data from the Independent Project Analysis group showed that mining projects over the past decade experienced average cost overruns of 65%, Eloot said at a supply and demand outlook panel on October 10.
Maximo Pacheco, chairman of Codelco, said that the Chilean state miner had planned to invest $11 billion in structural projects to extend mine life over the past decade. “At the end of the day,” he told the summit, “it was $21 billion because it was more expensive, more complex, more uncertain, more unpredictable.”
The combination of higher capital intensity, longer permitting timelines and declining ore grades, Gait said, meant that “we just do not have those kinds of shovel-ready investments in quite the order that we need, to ensure that we have a balanced market over the medium term.”
US copper tariffs have fragmented the market, with CME December futures trading about $500 per tonne above LME prices.
Despite some slowdown in the energy transition in Western markets, executives said that the fundamental shift toward electrification was still intact and would drive sustained copper demand growth.
“We will go globally to 50% electrification from 32%, as part of the energy mix within the next decade,” Petev said.
Moderator: Tom Wilson, Senior Energy Correspondent, Financial TimesPanelists: Ivan Petev, Global Head of Base Metals, Gunvor Group; Paul Gait, Senior Vice President, Strategy, Anglo AmericanPanel: Copper – The metal driving the next supercycleEvent: FT Mining Summit, October 10, 2025
China’s grid spending has risen by nearly 17% year on year, driven by renewable energy infrastructure investment, Petev said. The country was also building 32 new nuclear reactors, he added.
The ICSG noted that Chinese copper usage was expected to rise by 3.3% in 2025 but to slow to just 1% growth in 2026. China currently represents about 58% of world refined copper usage, the group said.
Defense spending was emerging as a significant new source of copper demand, accounting for about 8% of total copper consumption in Europe, according to McKinsey’s Eloot.
“If you look at the targets as a percentage of [gross domestic product], they’re going up,” he said, noting that advanced electronics applications in defense systems were copper-intensive.
Eloot said that McKinsey analysis showed that defense-related demand was mainly for copper, with smaller percentages for steel and aluminium.
Not all delegates at the event were equally bullish. Natalie Scott-Gray, senior metals demand analyst at StoneX, warned that the market should “expect the unexpected,” pointing to nickel as a cautionary tale.
Nickel was expected to show a surge in demand for use in electric vehicle batteries, but the rapid adoption of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries in China, which now accounted for 80% of light vehicles, has left the nickel market in surplus.
“This is the complete opposite of what expectations originally said. That change happened in about 15 years or even less – very quickly,” Scott-Gray said.
But other delegates argued that copper faced less risk of substitution than nickel due to its unique properties of electrical conductivity. “Copper,” Petev said, “is not substitutable.”
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