Copper is currently just over $3 per pound, but Leigh Goehring of research firm Goehring & Rozencwajg believes prices could rise as high as $10 during this cycle.
In an interview at the recent Mines and Money conference in New York, Goehring explained that this bullish forecast stems from price action that has taken place in previous bull markets.
“We basically went from a bottom of about $0.60 reached in 2000 to a top of about $4.10 reached in the beginning part of 2006. So in a five-year period you basically went up four or five and a half times the price,” he explained to the Investing News Network (INN).
Goehring added, “I wouldn’t be surprised if something along that magnitude happens in this bull market. We started to hit the bottom a little below $2 back in the first quarter of 2016, so … a target price would be anywhere between $7 to $10 in this cycle.”
Watch the interview above for more insight on copper from Goehring, plus additional commentary from his partner Adam Rozencwajg. You can also read the transcript below.
INN: It’s our first time speaking, so I thought you could begin by telling me a little bit about yourselves and about the firm.
LG: Goehring & Rozencwajg is a firm that was established about two and a half years ago. I’m Lee Goehring, and I established the firm with my long-term colleague Adam Rozencwajg. It is a firm that’s dedicated to researching and investing in global commodity markets.
INN: We’re here at Mines and Money in New York. Earlier today, Leigh, you gave a talk on copper. For those who might not be aware, how have we seen copper perform so far this year? And has its price movement been in line with your expectations?
LG: Copper had a very strong year in 2017. And in the very beginning part of January, it hit a price of about $3.25 a pound. It has pulled back and actually has been one of the weaker metal stocks this year. However, I should point out that the weakness that we’re seeing now is — we believe is nothing more than a pullback in a very large, multi-stage bull market that is going to take place in the next five years.
INN: Yes. In your talk, you gave quite a long-term perspective on the copper price. Can you briefly go over what has led us to this point?
LG: Of all the metals we follow, copper, we believe, has the most interesting and best supply/demand profile of any metal market out there today. What’s going to happen in global copper markets is that incredibly strong demand … will be driven by two forces. One will be the desire to invest in renewables, because remember, renewables require a lot more copper intensity in their investment than standard hydrocarbon fuel plants. I’m talking about wind and solar farms here.
That demand will be layered on top of traditional very, very strong demand that’s going to come from basically the emerging markets — not only China, but India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam. Each of which is entering their period of very rapid and intense copper consumption. So you have very strong demand, and on the supply side we are running into long-term structural [supply concerns]. We have a depletion issue in the copper business … we basically use, we calculate, about 500,000 tonnes of copper supply a year to depletion. And the … very large, what I call mega-projects, coming online in the next five to seven years are few and far between. So we believe that you will have very, very strong demand that’s going to basically collide with very, very weak supply. It’s an incredibly bullish story.
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