Is Copper The New Gold?

On a recent cross country plane trip, I found myself seated beside a very talkative Oriental man.  He spoke pretty good English, and after a while I understood that he was a Chinese mining engineer who was on his way to Africa to begin an assignment for his company at a copper mine.

I told him that I was in the business of selling extension cords, and the conversation quickly turned to his assessment of how China was moving to become the world’s dominant player the copper trade.

A recent article in Bloomberg Business Week brought me back to that conversation.

The article was titled “Copper: China’s Red Gold“, and it lays out in detail how China is aggressively moving to control as much of the world’s supply of this common metal as they can and how no other governments seem to be paying attention.

China has spent over $100 billion buying up mining and energy companies since 2008 and at least $5 billion of that has been for copper mining reserves all over the world.

Why should you care?

If you are in the sound, lighting, concert or special event industry, copper cable is central to your life.  While it is possible to move the transmission of low voltage data to fiber, the only practical method for moving the high energy required for lighting stages and pushing speakers is copper.  If you need to move high amperage electricity from one place to another (like a dimmer rack to a lighting fixture or an amplifier to a speaker cabinet), then copper is your only choice.

Modern large scale concerts and major theatrical events depend on tons and tons of copper cable, and it looks like that in the future this is a market that the Chinese will control.

Back to my airline seatmate.  His company was so focused on their African mining project that he expected to be on the job for at least two years before he was given a break to visit his family back in China.

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