Three meetings of investors in some of the world’s biggest mining companies over the next six days will lay the foundations for what could be a period of significant change in the world’s copper industry.
Worker Cleaning Copper Cathodes at the Escondida mine in Chile. (Photo by Oliver Llaneza Hesse/Construction Photography/Avalon/Getty Images)
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Switzerland-based Glencore is first cab off the rank when it holds a capital markets day later today (December 3) with most interest in the company’s copper mining and trading operations which have become its major profit earner thanks to a steep rise in the copper price.
London-based Rio Tinto follows on Thursday with its own capital markets day which will be the first major outing for the company’s new chief executive Simon Trott who is proposing fundamental changes to the way the company operates as copper profits rise to challenge iron ore earnings.
Canada’s Teck Resources follows next week with a December 9 special meeting for shareholders to vote on a proposed merger with London-based, South African focused Anglo American.
Copper The Common Thread
Copper is the common thread which connects the three companies with the immediate focus being on a plan to combine two big South American mines into one of the world’s major sources of copper.
The copper asset which is attracting closest attention is Quebrada Blanca high in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and immediately adjacent to the bigger Collahuasi mine.
Joining the two into a single operation has long been seen as a logical move but one which could not overcome corporate differences and complex logistics.
Collahuasi is 44% owned by Glencore, 44% by BHP, and 12% by the Japanese trading company Mitsui.
Quebrada Blanca is 60% owned by Teck, 30% by the Japanese trading company Sumitomo, and 10% by Chile’s government owned mining company Codelco.
Glencore’s is currently on the sidelines of the copper asset shuffle but did try two years ago to merge with Teck, attracted by the value-creating potential from integrating Collahuasi and Quebrada Blanca, eventually buying Teck’s coal assets as compensation.
Rio Tinto is also on the sidelines but is reported to have held talks with Glencore in the middle of the year about a merger to create a global copper mining giant.
Not involved, but a keen observer and potential corporate raider which could crash the copper party is Australian-based BHP, the world’s biggest mining company, which has had its merger proposals rebuffed three times by Anglo American.
BHP is also sitting out the current phase of the corporate copper game but is likely to be keeping a watchful eye on the newly formed Anglo/Teck being created by the merger of Anglo American and Teck.
Workers next to a glacier in the high Andes of South America. (Photo by Oliver Llaneza Hesse/Construction Photography/Avalon/Getty Images)
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Driving everything in the race for copper assets is the outlook for the price of a metal which has deep traditional markets in construction, transport and electronics with a rapidly growing demand thanks to the electrification of everything and to meet the requirements of data centers being built to handle the power requirements of artificial intelligence.
Since the start of the year the copper price on the London Metal Exchange has risen by 30% to $11,189 a ton and slightly more in the U.S. where demand has been stronger thanks to uncertainty over tariffs on imported metal.
The outlook is for the copper price to continue rising. UBS, an investment bank is forecasting a price of $11,500/t in the first quarter of next year, with progressive rises over the rest of 2026, reaching $12,000/t in June, $12,500/t in September, ending next year at $13,000/t
Citi, another investment bank, sees a copper price of $12,000/t as its base case over the next six-to-12 months with a 40% chance of a bull market price of $14,000/t.
