Supply and demand situation of China’s copper industry in 2025

2025 represents the concluding year of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan and a critical period for consolidating the sustained momentum of economic recovery. During this year, the global governance system faced severe challenges, international coordination and cooperation weakened noticeably, and the world economic landscape underwent a profound yet subtle restructuring. Against this backdrop, a systematic analysis of the operating conditions of China’s copper industry and the deep-seated contradictions constraining its high-quality development is of great significance for mitigating resource bottleneck risks and promoting a green, low-carbon transition. The analysis indicates that in 2025 China’s copper industry maintained steady and generally improving production performance, with economic returns continuing to grow and copper prices remaining at elevated and rising levels. However, smelting processing fees for copper concentrate kept declining, forcing copper smelting enterprises to rely on long-term contract processing fees for copper concentrate and by-product revenues to sustain profitability. On the consumption side, refined copper consumption in China grew steadily, while clear differentiation emerged across end-use sectors: the real estate sector remained relatively weak, whereas other sectors all achieved varying degrees of growth. In terms of trade, the import and export value of China’s copper products rose sharply, and imports of copper raw materials continued to expand. Influenced by domestic-international price differentials and tariff policies, the volumes of certain imported and exported products and the composition of import source countries changed to different extents. At the same time, China’s copper industry still faces both long-standing and emerging challenges, including a continuously rising external dependence on raw materials, increasing risks associated with overseas resource development, shortages of certain high-end equipment and high-end deep-processed products, generally weak overall profitability, and overly rapid capacity expansion in some segments accompanied by persistent investment impulses. Focusing on these problems and risks, and in order to adapt to the evolving domestic and international environment, safeguard the security of raw material supply, and advance the building of a strong copper industry, this paper proposes the following policy recommendations: ①enhance raw material supply capacity through multiple channels; ②alleviate supply and demand imbalances through technological innovation; ③establish a diversified and highly resilient overseas resource supply system; ④strictly control smelting capacity to promote the high-quality development of the copper smelting sector; ⑤strengthen price risk management capabilities across the entire industrial chain.