China's copper premiums are at their highest since January, and it's Africa's fault

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-07-20 — copper cathode trading Asia

I was looking at Shanghai Metals Market data last week and felt something shift. The CIF Shanghai copper premiums for August delivery had crawled up to $95 to $105 per metric ton—the highest they've been all year.

That doesn't happen by accident.

The story begins with flooding. In March, the Kasumbalesa Bridge between the DRC and Zambia washed out, which means roughly a third of the DRC's refined copper shipments stopped moving. Thousands of trucks sat stranded. You cannot move metal if your bridge is gone. Tanzania's Port of Dar es Salaam—which handles about two-thirds of African copper heading to China—then got tied up in election unrest. So now cargoes are rerouting through Durban, Walvis Bay, Beira. Slower. Costlier. The DRC alone is nearly 40% of China's refined copper imports. When that corridor backs up, the whole spot market feels dizzy.

What's happening is straightforward supply starvation.

By mid-July, late-arriving bill of lading cargoes were fetching around $100 per metric ton. That's not theoretical. That's what people actually paid. Add the EQ-grade cathodes—trading at $60 to $68—and you see the tightness is broad-based, more or less across all qualities. Not selective. Not a moment. A genuine crush of available prompt tonnage.

The arbitrage helped push it along too.

For most of the first half of the year, importing copper into China made you lose money. The SHFE-LME ratio was underwater, implying losses of around 140 yuan per metric ton. Actually, that's not quite right—it wasn't quite that brutal by mid-July, but close enough that traders sat on their hands. Once the numbers tipped, latent buying surfaced fast. Buyers who had been waiting on the sidelines moved to cover near-term requirements. Fewer cargoes available. More money chasing them. That's when premiums spike.

Then there's the US tariff angle.

American tariff policy has been hoovering up global copper cathode, pulling tonnage that would have otherwise sat in the global competition pool. Less optionality for Chinese importers. Less negotiating leverage when African arrivals slip. It's not written into port statistics, but it's working in the background, and traders feel it.

Long-term contract holders are also dipping into the spot market to fill gaps. April and May arrivals got delayed or canceled outright, so even buyers with contracted volumes cannot avoid the higher premiums. You buy the contract, the cargo doesn't show, you buy spot at $100 per metric ton to cover the gap.

Something is bent.

What comes next depends mostly on African logistics stabilizing. The Kasumbalesa won't be repaired overnight, and southern African port reroutes are running on thin margins. If Chinese demand stays firm through August—which the destocking trend at bonded warehouses suggests it might—then the supply side has no obvious relief. Premiums could hold or push higher before easing. The market's main bearish scenario, a sharp improvement in the arbitrage that draws in competing prompt supply, looks harder to achieve when the supply simply isn't sitting in a warehouse waiting to move.

The ceiling here is not about price discovery. It's about trucks waiting at a broken bridge.

Tags: copper cathode, LME-SHFE arbitrage, DRC copper, CIF China copper premiums 2026, African copper supply disruption, copper cathode import premium July 2026