Copper: Takeaways from CESCO week

The copper industry gathered in Santiago last week for the annual CESCO week. Overall, sentiment was fairly bullish and that seems to be flowing into prices this week, with copper having another go at resistance in the $6,500s. Below we highlight some of the key takeaways from CESCO and give our opinion on some of the main talking points.

Mine disruptions are back

After a relative dearth of mine supply disruptions in 2018, there was talk that unplanned outages are getting back to their ‘normal levels’ this year. Antofagasta, for example, estimated losses of as much as 1m tonnes of copper production in 2019, versus 600,000 tonnes of losses...