Lead – TCs drift higher as smelter cutbacks remain in place

摘要

The lead concentrates market has continued to ease a little over the past month driven by China where weare seeing weak demand from smelters and sluggish trading activity. Although some lead-zinc mines havebeen out of production in northern China sine Q4 2017 and more mines will halt production in February, thetrading of lead concentrate has been much slower than that of zinc concentrate. Lead TCs have driftedhigher as a result and we heard that they continued to increase by around RMB100/t over the last month toaround RMB1,300-1,500/t in most provinces. However, lead TCs for imported concentrates have beenstable, and we heard that they continue to be in the $10 -20/t range for low-silver lead concentrate and $20-30/t for high-silver (3,000g/t) lead concentrate