Copper prices reached an eight-year high earlier today, fueled by demand from China, where manufacturers are expanding plants to make home appliances, televisions and cars. China's appetite for raw materials, as its economy expands, is draining inventories elsewhere in the world.
Chile's Codelco, the world's largest copper producer, hasn't shipped any copper to New Orleans in almost a year, instead sending more metal to Asia, Casiano said. Pacorini's warehouses on the Mississippi River held about 90,000 metric tons of copper in January 2002. Now they have 5,000.
Chilean copper ``that used to go to the U.S. goes to China,'' Juan Eduardo Herrera, the corporate vice president of strategy at Codelco, said in an interview in Santiago. The state- owned company produces 35 percent of the nation's copper.
China has accounted for much of the increase in demand. Copper consumption in the country will jump as much as 12 percent this year after a 20 percent gain in 2003, said Andrew Keen, manager of base metals at CRU International, a private research company in London.
China last year consumed a fifth of the copper produced in the world as its economy surged. The nation's industrial production rose 19 percent in January from a year earlier, the fastest pace on record.
Stockpiles in warehouses in Long Beach, California, have dropped 56 percent this year alone. Inventories have declined in warehouses along the West Coast, including Los Angeles, which supplies copper to Asia.
``All the metal in the Long Beach warehouse has gone to China,'' said Tim Strelitz, chief executive of Los Angeles-based California Metal-X Inc., which produces about 3 million pounds of copper-based ingots a month used in making faucets and valves.
