Constrained consumer demand a serious drag on recovery, Concord CEO says

The year 2020 has been the ultimate stress test for commodity market participants and will stay challenging amid significantly impaired consumer demand trends due to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the chief executive officer of Concord Resources.

Mark Hansen said the economy is operating on 70-90% of its usual demand strength due to the pandemic, with huge portions of previously high-demand growth markets - such as aerospace and automotive - seriously affected.
"The impacted areas in mining have probably been more transient than permanent in so much as large operators will figure out how to operate substantial assets at a profit in a pandemic. What I'm more concerned about is getting demand back to actual growth beyond recovery to 70-90% of consumer products; it's a little more difficult," he told Fastmarkets in an interview.

"When you look at aerospace and automotive markets globally, it's going to be a while I think before we can really call true growth as having returned to consumer markets. There will be recovery, and we're probably back to a 70-80% level of recovery, but if we stay there for some time it...

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