January Tin Price Forecast: Optimism Among Chinese Tin Smelters Despite Downward Trend

January 13, 2016

The Shanghai Metals Market conducted a survey that found about 35% of Chinese tin smelters are optimistic over tin prices in the short-term. In addition, recent market research anticipates the global tin market to grow at a moderate rate of about 2% due in part to the increase in lead acid battery usage.

Government regulations, most notably in China, are forcing manufacturers to replace antimony and cadmium in lead acid batteries with tin to alter the composition of the grid alloy. However, it should be noted that we consider this just a blip in the radar and the downward trend for tin is expected in our medium- and long-term projections.

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China’s economy continues to be a sore spot on the global radar and as a top consumer of many of the industrial metals sourced, its fate plays a significant role in the price trends for those metals.

Chinese Economy Not Off to a Good Start in 2016

As we reported earlier this week, the global start market took a huge hit to begin the year. In fact, $2.5 trillion has been cleared from the value of global equities this week, starting in China and leading to a domino effect that has rippled through the rest of the world. This has led to one of the worst starts for the stock markets since the 1980s.

Our own Stuart Burns wrote: “On the Shanghai market, trading was stopped on Monday as ‘circuit breakers’ closed the market after shares plunged 5% and, again, Thursday trading was canceled for the day after just 29 minutes when the CSI300 fell more than 7%. Under the ‘circuit breaker’ system, created after the plunge in shares last August, if an index rose or fell 5%, trading was halted for 15 minutes. If it dropped by 7%, trading stopped for the rest of the day.”

Source:MetalMiner