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The discoveries of archaeological artifacts proved that copper which is a metal element had been used by the ancient people as adornments, tools and armors. Today copper is now popularly demanded primarily by the manufacturing industry as raw material for its production largely affecting the copper prices in the market.
What Makes Copper Valuable
Copper is a mineral its ductility, malleability and highly conductive property to electricity make it the global choice of the manufacturing industries. High end technologies applied by most manufacturing industries uses more copper as raw material for the production of various hybrid products. From the law of supply and demand, the high demand of copper from its market subsequently increases copper prices to a greater cost.
 Common Uses of Copper
According to research approximately 50% of copper demand is from the construction manufacturers and 17% of which is from the electronic industry.
Construction industry uses copper for wires and plumbing aspect. On the other hand, electronic gizmo of today and gizmos of yesterday uses copper as raw material for wiring system because of its ductility and malleability property. Transportation manufacturers uses copper for structured circuit wiring because of its erosive resistant ability which is a very important factor for manufacturing ships and cars where it is said that a standard car utilizes 27.6 kg of copper whereas a hybrid model of car approximately uses twice as much copper. Coin manufacturers as well use copper for coin production.
Probable Factors Affecting Copper Prices
The trend of flow of the copper prices in the world market is unpredictable. However, it was reported that sometime between the years 2005-2006 was the period having the highest demand of copper worldwide resulting to a significant imbalance of supply and demand which greatly affected the pricing of copper in the world market. There are a lot of factors considered to have probably caused the rise and fall of copper’s monetary value in its market. Enumerated down below are the commonly probable reasons.
· Law of Supply and Demand
It is a fact that imbalanced between supply and demand significantly affects prices of commodities including copper itself. In cases of high demand for the copper metal subsequently there will be increase of its market value. How high would be the elevation of the price of copper largely depend how large also is the demand and how wide are its sources.
· Climate Changes
Since copper is a mineral which is a natural earth content the only way to obtain the mineral is through excavation of land. Sometimes excavation process for copper mining is hampered by weather changes especially with the recent global climate changes. Typhoons, floods and other natural disasters are great threats for smooth sailing of mining process.
· Manpower
Running a company especially with great number of employees including company land mining is sometimes have drew backs as there is always the threat of employee strikes, mass sick leaves, vacation leaves and the likes. Such cases can hamper the flow of excavation process resulting to the fall of copper supply thus affecting the rate of copper prices in the market.
· Oil Price Hike
Tools used for land mining are powered by fuel such as drills for excavating purpose as well as vehicles for transport. However, with the increasing oil price in the world market copper mining is somehow directly affected. Company mining owners has to increase its prices for copper because of the increase in cost production.
· Competing Small Time Metal Scrappers
Scrapyards sometimes offers a higher price for copper tempting small time metal scrappers to search for copper from any sources available aside from mining which is often accomplished in illegal ways although not entirely. Example of illegal efforts is melting of coins with copper contents. Sometimes the value of copper content in the coin is higher than the coin’s monetary value.
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