Some major Chinese scrap importers have stopped buying from overseas over fears of not receiving quotas for the fourth quarter of 2019, leading them to postpone deliveries until March next year after Lunar New Year, Fastmarkets has learned.
Many buyers in Ningbo province, a major destination for No2 copper scrap imports to China, have already used up their quotas assigned earlier and some of them have now chosen to stay out of the spot market. "We filed the application [for additional import allowance] a month ago but have heard no update since then, and we were not included in the latest quota announcement list," a buyer source based in Ningbo said. In the first quota announcement in mid-June, Ningbo copper scrap buyers were granted quotas to purchase a total 237,680...