50,000 tons of copper were taken away in one go! Mercuria grabs goods early to deal with US tariff risks

The Zhitong Finance App learned that global commodity trading giant Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. is speeding up the accumulation of copper to cope with global supply shortages caused by potential US tariffs. People familiar with the matter revealed that the company has applied to extract about 50,000 tons of copper from warehouses supervised by the London Metal Exchange (LME), which is the largest inventory removal operation in more than 10 years, and directly pushes copper prices to a record high of 11,500 US dollars per ton.

Since this year, the global copper trade pattern has experienced severe turmoil due to US President Trump's announcement of plans to impose additional tariffs on copper. The February tariff threat caused New York copper futures prices to outperform LME copper prices, triggering a massive influx of traders including Mercuria, Trafigura (Trafigura), and GLNCY.US (GLNCY.US) into the US market using the arbitrage window, leading to a record increase in US copper imports.

At the end of July, Trump suddenly announced that commodity grade copper would not be included in tariffs for the time being, causing arbitrage transactions to be interrupted for a short time. However, with his promise to re-examine the primary copper tax increase plan in 2026, and with the recent sharp rise in New York copper, traders are once again speeding up shipping the metal to the US to prepare goods in advance before the tariffs are implemented.

Kostas Bintas, Mercuria's head of rapid expansion of the metals business, said last week that as the trade boom heats up again, he expects copper prices to “break deeper into the historical range” over the next few weeks, and warned that buyers outside the US may face a “serious shortage” in the first quarter of next year. He said, “If global supply continues to flow like this, there may be no electricity available outside of the US.”

Bintas' strong bullish outlook is not an exception. Executives from rival iXM and Gunvor also warned in recent months that multiple global mine disruptions are increasing the risk of supply gaps. As more supplies are shipped to the US and stock exchanges continue to be drawn away, manufacturers may have to pay higher prices to obtain electric copper.

It is worth noting that most of the copper in LME inventory comes from China and Russia. These metals cannot be used to deliver New York Mercantile Exchange contracts, so traders are transferring copper from LME to allow more deliverable metals to flow to the US. On Thursday alone, traders removed an additional 7,450 tons from storage.

Although copper stocks currently in US port and exchange warehouses are at historically high levels, the market generally believes that these stocks will not return to the global market in the short term when New York copper trading continues in the premium range and the tariff threat has not been lifted.

Goldman Sachs pointed out in a report released on Wednesday that communication with spot traders showed that the flow of copper to the US in the first half of 2026 will “restart faster than expected.” The sharp rise in copper prices on the same day was “mainly driven by LME withdrawals, and these withdrawals may release more metals to the US.”

As global traders rush copper into the US and exchange inventories continue to decline, upward momentum for copper prices to break through continues to accumulate, causing this wave of markets to think the “long overdue” super cycle may actually begin.