China Plans to Set Up Copper Resource Prospecting Venture Fund

A source from China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association Copper Branch disclosed on April 12th that, the copper industry plans to set up copper resource prospecting venture fund, it will earmark around 30% from the value added tax of import copper raw materials to set up copper resource prospecting venture fund, and change massive foreign exchange reserve into copper resource reserve needed by the development of national economy, support enterprises with necessary strength to conduct resource development work including overseas prospecting, mining, merger, and acquisition and so on.

Benefiting from the rise in copper price, in 2010 domestic copper ore mining and dressing industry fulfilled a total industrial output value of 43.474 billion yuan, up by 14.5 billion yuan on a year-on-year basis; copper smelting also fulfilled total industrial output value of 357 billion yuan, up by 113.8 billion yuan on a yearon-year basis.

Despite inadequate domestic copper ore resources, driven by high copper price and other factors, “In recent years China witnessed a boom in copper project investment, the investment amount increased year by year, enterprises continually expanded scale, social capital entered the copper industry in massively quantity.” The above mentioned person said, at present, domestic copper smelting enterprises have not yet completely removed extensive development model, their operation concept to rely on scale expansion to enlarge market influence and improve competitiveness have not yet been fundamentally changed, this resulted in over-fast growth of China’s smelting production capacity and copper processing capacity.