MELBOURNE 2013: The Supercycle Has Whizzed Past & The Party is Over

摘要

About 16 months elapsed before the next conference in the series, so that Informa could reset the timing back to the late Summer, March 2013). And the 13th Informa Mineral Sands Conference was back in Melbourne. Opening the conference with his keynote paper titled TiO2 on the Supercycle Track, Mr Adams paid tribute to the late Dr Alan Heap, who had died suddenly in March 2011, at the age of 58. His first slide was a reprise from Dr Heap's paper (Mildura, December 2009) - a chart illustrating the waxing and waning of 'intensity of use' (the volume consumption of a commodity, in this case copper, per unit of GDP) for the US, Japan and China. Dr Heap had noted that demand growth in the US was the main driver of the commodities supercycle's upswing in the 1910s and 1920s; Japan was the main driver in the 1960s and 1970s; and China had been the main driver of the upswing onwards from the late 1990s. To illustrate this point, Mr Adams showed a chart comparing China's shares of world tonnage consumption for the years 2000 and 2012. China's share of world iron ore consumption rose from 17% in 2000 to 70% in 2012. Comparable figures for copper are 11% and 40%; for nickel, 8% and 44%; for zircon, 17% and 53%; for TiO2 pigment, 10% and 31%; and for TiO2 feedstock, 7% and 34%.