50,000 tons of copper are taken away in one breath! Mercuria seizes goods in advance to deal with the risk of US tariffs.

Global commodity trading giant Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. is accelerating the hoarding of copper to cope with the potential global supply shortage triggered by US tariffs. Informed sources revealed that the company has applied to withdraw about 50,000 tons of copper from warehouses regulated by the London Metal Exchange (LME), marking the largest withdrawal in over a decade and directly driving copper prices towards a historical high of $11,500 per ton. Since the beginning of this year, the global copper trading landscape has been in turmoil due to US President Trump's announcement of plans to impose tariffs on copper. The tariff threats in February led to a significant increase in the price of copper futures in New York, outperforming the LME copper price, prompting traders like Mercuria, Trafigura, and Glencore to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities to enter the US market, resulting in record-breaking growth in US copper imports. At the end of July, Trump suddenly announced that copper products would temporarily not be subject to tariffs, causing a temporary interruption in arbitrage trading. However, with his promise to reassess the plan to tax primary copper in 2026, and with the recent surge in copper futures in New York, traders have once again accelerated shipping metals to the US in order to stock up ahead of the tariffs. Kostas Bintas, head of Mercuria's rapidly expanding metal business, stated last week that with the trade frenzy heating up again, he expects copper prices to "break through historical boundaries more deeply" in the coming weeks, and warned that buyers outside the US may face "severe shortages" in the first quarter of next year. He said, "If global supply continues to flow like this, buyers outside the US may have no copper available." Bintas's strong bullish view is not an isolated case. Executives from competitors IXM and Gunvor have also warned in recent months that disruptions at multiple mines globally are exacerbating supply shortage risks. As more supply is shipped to the US and exchange inventories continue to be depleted, manufacturers may have to pay higher prices to obtain copper. It is worth noting that most of the copper in LME warehouses comes from China and Russia, metals that cannot be used for delivery in New York Mercantile Exchange contracts, so traders are withdrawing copper from the LME to allow more deliverable metal to flow to the US. Just on Thursday, traders added an additional withdrawal of 7,450 tons. Although copper inventories in US ports and exchange warehouses are at historic highs, the market generally believes that these inventories will not flow back into the global market in the short term as long as copper futures in New York continue to trade at a premium and the tariff threats are not resolved. Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. stated in a report released on Wednesday that communication with spot traders indicates that copper flows to the US in the first half of 2026 will "restart faster than expected." The sharp rise in copper prices that day was "driven mainly by LME withdrawals, which may release more metal flow to the US." As global traders rush to ship copper to the US and exchange inventories continue to decrease, the upward momentum of copper prices is accumulating, leading the market to believe that the long-awaited super cycle may finally begin.