IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: 5 key stories from March 11

Here are five Fastmarkets MB stories you might have missed on Monday March 11 that are worth another look.

The London Metal Exchange and Fastmarkets launched three new cash-settled derivative contracts on Monday March 11 to provide effective risk management tools for the aluminium, alumina and cobalt markets.

The LME is at the heart of yet another warehousing conundrum, with pressure mounting for a ruling on why the linked load-in/load-out rule was not activated at end of January despite a large queue of Glencore-owned aluminium appearing at Istim’s warehouses in Malaysia.

Malaysia and India have unique competitive advantages in manganese alloy production that other Asian alloy producers are unable to match, according to panelists at Fastmarkets’ Asian Ferro-alloys conference in Hong Kong on Monday March 11.

The global copper supply chain could be underestimating the market impact of Chinese scrap cuts amid the country’s growing consumption, established industry expert Jonathan Barnes told Fastmarkets.

A move toward buying almost all ferro-alloys on long-term contracts has left the spot market industry in the United States so quiet that some traders are looking at China to understand spot fundamentals, Barry Lazar, chief executive officer of steel raw materials supplier Medima, said this week.

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Over a decade since its first attempt, Glencore appears to have taken another tilt at Rio Tinto.
Participants in the market for copper scrap and blister in China, the world’s largest importer of copper raw materials, expect there to be fiercer competition for material in 2025, industry sources told Fastmarkets in the week to Thursday January 9.
Africa’s first transcontinental rail network, known as the Lobito Corridor, which aims to eventually connect almost the entire regional copper-cobalt belt with additional links across sub-Saharan Africa, is on track to break ground early in 2026, a senior official at the US Department of State told Fastmarkets.
The availability of relatively untapped resources, a huge influx of Chinese investment and a rapid licensing system have helped the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to become one of the world’s three key producers of copper.
The European steel and aluminium scrap industries urged the European Commission on Wednesday January 15 against taking action to curb scrap exports after domestic industry metals producers backed measures to do just that.
Renewed US-China trade tensions with Donald Trump’s second presidential term could bolster Southeast Asia’s aluminium scrap industry in 2025, particularly amid still-growing Chinese demand, sources told Fastmarkets by Tuesday, January 14.