What’s the logic behind this copper price surge?

Simply put, it's a battle for resources. For the past few decades, the global flow of copper has been one-way—massive exports of high-quality, low-impurity scrap copper from the US, which once accounted for the majority of imported copper. But that cycle has now been broken.

The turning point came at the policy level. The current US administration realized a serious issue: domestic copper reserves have dropped to dangerously low levels, barely enough to cover military strategic needs. So, using tariff threats, they managed to pull over a million tons of copper back to the US this year.

More importantly, demand is still expanding. The US power grid is severely outdated and now set for a massive overhaul—a huge copper consumer, since everything from transmission lines to transformers relies on copper. Add in new energy infrastructure projects, and the copper gap will only widen.

From a supply and demand perspective, copper holding firm at 100,000 RMB/ton makes sense. Once infrastructure projects really ramp up, given the current US copper reserves, the shortage will be even more dramatic. This isn’t hype—it’s a genuine repricing of resources.