Singapore 19/04/2016 - China’s Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group has warned of a net loss of 80 million-95 million yuan ($12-15 million) in the first quarter of this year.
This is opposed to the 52-million-yuan profit it made in January-March 2015.
The loss is due to a significant decline in selling prices of its products and an increase in finance expenses, the copper producer said in a filing to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange last Friday.
On the same day, Tongling Nonferrous also announced in a results brief a net loss of 666 million yuan in 2015, after making 301 million yuan of profit in 2014.
Weak demand and falling prices of commodities, along with a weakening Chinese yuan last year resulted in severe challenges for the company’s production and operations, it said.
The company’s production of its main products maintained stable growth, it said, but did not give absolute figures.
Tongling Nonferrous had produced 1.31 million tonnes of copper last year, up 6.5 percent from 2014, according to a presentation by a senior Tongling Nonferrous official in a copper conference in Shanghai in March.
The producer plans to produce 1.26 million tonnes of copper this year, down 3.8 percent from 2015, as part of its pact with other nine Chinese copper smelters to reduce their total production by 350,000 tonnes this year.
With 1.4 million tonnes per year of copper cathode production capacity, Tongling Nonferrous is China's largest and the world's second-biggest producer of refined copper, according to the company.