Focus: 2008 zinc mine supplies

摘要

In 2007, we increased our allowance for unforeseen disruption to Western mine supply from 2 percent to 4 percent in light of the significantly increased level of problems encountered in 2006. We again used a figure of 4 percent this year. This has again proved a wise move, although the scale of disruption has been much lower than was experienced last year. But if 4 percent was sufficient, we would not have had to lower our forecast of Western mine supply in 2008 at all. At the beginning of this year, we forecast Western mine supply totalling 7,660,000t in 2008, and this is 8.0 percent more than our latest estimate of output in 2007. We now forecast that it will total 7,515,000t, but this is still 5.9 percent higher than last year. Our forecast has therefore been cut by 145,000t since January.