Category: Commodities

China may be trying to transition to a services-led high technology economy that doesn't rely as much on manufacturing but that shift will take years. In the meantime, Chinese factories still need to rely on vast amounts of minerals, metals, and other mining products to bolster their ...

There's been a lot of discussion over the past year about China's desire to eliminate its dependence on Australian iron ore in favour of supplies from countries like Guinea, Algeria, South Africa and Brazil among others. China has been steadily trying ...

These are good days for Africa's metals and mineral exporters, who are seeing record prices thanks to strong demand, in part, from China and international automakers that produce new energy vehicles. The timing for this latest "commodity supercycle," ...

Months after news broke that China had entered into the global cocoa market with an initial delivery of 500 kilograms of beans shipped to Belgium from the southern island of Hainan, Ghanaians are still trying to figure out whether they have reason to be ...

The editorial board of Financial Times published an op-ed yesterday announcing a new commodities supercycle. They argued that the global pivot towards climate-friendlier technologies like electric vehicles is pushing demand for metals like cobalt, lithium and palladium (used in catalytic converters.) In addition, the Biden administration’s new commitments ...

Chinese cobalt imports fell 41.8% last year compared to the volumes shipped from the DRC in 2019, according to the mining news website Argus Media. The lockdowns in response to COVID-19 at the mines in the DRC and at South African ports, from where the precious metal ...

While Zambia tries to figure out how if/how it plans to restructure its $12 billion debt portfolio, government coffers stand to benefit from resurgent copper prices, a major source of export earnings. The price of copper recently ...

China's General Administration of Customs published a list of 46 meat processing plants around the world that have halted exports to China due to COVID-19 outbreaks among their workers. But Namibia, so far, is not on the list. ...

Two-way China-Africa trade increased slightly by 2.2% last year to $208.7 billion, according to newly released data from China's General Administration of Customs. At first glance, trade between these two regions seems to be quite balanced overall. ...

In an article that recently appeared in the Paris-based magazine The Africa Report, Andrew McGregor, Managing Director of the independent research organization Who Owns Whom, and Marthinus Havenga, Director of Cathkin Consulting, provided some interesting data on the top five export and import categories that dominate the ...

In the face of the ongoing trade war between China and the U.S., many of China’s pecan buyers have shifted their purchasing habits to neighboring Mexico. In fact, Mexico’s pecan exports to China increased by more than 3000% in 2018 relative to the previous year, with ...

China-Africa trade rebounded in 2018 after several years of steady declines. Trade between the two regions last year increased by nearly 20% to $204 billion, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce. The bulk of Africa's exports to China is raw materials, namely oil ...