Copper substitutes

By Tshepo Magagane

Air-conditioning units – manufacturers are putting Copper sticker on top to show that this one uses Copper…

…because, with Copper it lasts 50yrs instead of 5yrs with aluminium!

2% of market lost to aluminium!

Palladium used to be honestly a rounding thing when doing PGM companies – price would be c20% of Platinum price when I started out – so would not pay much attention to it…

…I was taught that it could be easily substituted…

…the price then started to move – substantially – when it started, I sat down with a metallurgist friend who deals with this on a daily basis…multiple times (we have a significantly overlapping family and every time we would meet up at an event – we would just talk about it for hour or 2)…

…and he went “theory is one thing but you just cant move back and forth, it has to be a 20 or 30yr decision”!

Even with things such as CGA; we have know about this for well over 2 decades (from my time starting out)…it has taken up as much market share as it can!

Copper is about first movers – China understands that – just like you see the deindustrialisation of German industry without Russian gas – you dont have copper, it wont just be deindustrialisation; you will stop growing all together!

The West developed through violently extracting minerals at no cost to itself – that is no longer the case – why you see all this contorting instead of coming up with capital to secure the minerals.

And historic correlations means ZERO…remember the gold v interest rates one…