China's copper concentrate and ore imports in May fell to their lowest in 18 months as mining outages crimped supplies to the world's top metals consumer and producer, but unwrought metal arrivals jumped from a month earlier, data showed on Thursday. Imports of copper concentrate and ore, raw materials used to make metal, totalled 1.15 million tonnes, their lowest since October 2015, the General Administration of Customs showed.
That was down 20 percent from a year earlier and 15.4 percent lower than April, the data showed. Arrivals of anode, refined, alloy and semi-finished copper products came in at 390,000 tonnes in May, up 30 percent from a month earlier but down 9 percent from a year ago.
The year-on-year drop in unwrought metal imports may raise some concerns that the ferocious pace of manufacturing activity seen in the world's second-largest economy in late 2016 and early 2017 has not been sustainable, hurting demand for metal used in infrastructure and construction. But the jump from April suggests that traders replaced some of the lost raw materials with refined metal. "Refined copper imports tend to increase when there is limited availability of concentrate, so the decrease in concentrate supply could be the result of a lingering effect from the strike in Chile and supply disruptions at Freeport in Indonesia," said Amy Li, economist at National Australia Bank in Melbourne.