Commodities
Freeport to Break Away From Copper Benchmark It Set for Decades
Bundles of copper cathode sheets at the hydromat plant within the Freeport-McMoRan open-pit copper mining complex in Morenci, Arizona.
Photographer: Rebecca Noble/BloombergFreeport McMoRan Inc. plans to break away from the benchmark pricing system underpinning global sales of mined copper ores to protect the profitability of smelters, the company’s top commercial executive said in an interview.
The global copper industry has long relied on a single benchmark for sales of semi-processed ores known as concentrates. Copper smelters receive processing fees called treatment and refining charges, or TC/RCs, to turn concentrates into metal.