Antofagasta will target record copper output in 2019 while expecting the market to head into a small deficit next year, boosting copper prices, its chief executive officer Ivan Arriagada said in an interview with Fastmarkets.
The London-listed Chilean copper miner has issued guidance to produce 750,000-790,000 tonnes of copper in 2019, up 8% from this year's expected 705,000-720,000 tonnes."It will be a record year in terms of production," Arriagada said in an interview during Asia Copper Week in Shanghai last Thursday.Antofagasta's output hike is largely due to higher grades of ore scheduled to be mined from its Centinela mine, a reverse of an industry trend that has had grades deplete at major projects."It's a bit unusual for copper because most of the time you're actually fighting lower grade, but in our case we had conditions of lower grade this year and higher in 2019," Arriagada said.Antofagasta announced last week that it had internally approved a $1.3 billion expansion of its flagship...