Prices of LME are playing a key role for companies that trade in non-ferrous metals such as copper, aluminium, lead and zinc. All companies dealing with metals know the phenomena that prices can be strongly fluctuating due to many factors that may affect the global market such as oil price and US dollar exchange rate.
Copper (Cu) and aluminium (Al) are the main component of power cables. 50 to 70% of power cable price is determined by the quantity of copper, less in case of cables with aluminium conductors. Thus, the power cable price is varying due to the fluctuating price for metals which are linked with the changes of oil price as well as USD exchange rate. Considering such fact for projects cost estimate stage may reap lots of advantages especially when it comes to determining the budget required for procuring materials.
The London Metal Exchange (LME) is the global platform for trading non-ferrous metals. So we take latest LME notations, 3-Month-Buyers, for a metric ton of copper (Cu), aluminium (Al) and lead (Pb). The LME notations are multiplied by the mass of the correspondig metal parts to get the prices for the various metals per meter.
Steel is not traded on the LME. One possible price index is the Shanghai Steel Rebar Futures which is what we use. For example, on on 07.06.2018, the highest value was 4281 CNY. With the exchange rate of 0.1565 USD/CNY, this results in 670 USD.
| Metal | USD/mt | Remark |
|---|---|---|
| Copper (Cu) | 6145.5 | example price LME 3-Month-Buyers, dated 2019-05-10 |
| Aluminium (Al) | 1800.0 | example price LME 3-Month-Buyers, dated 2019-05-10 |
| Lead (Pb) | 1834.0 | example price LME 3-Month-Buyers, dated 2019-05-10 |
| Zinc (Zn) | 2629.5 | example price LME 3-Month-Buyers, dated 2019-05-10 |
| Nickel (Ni) | 11900.0 | example price LME 3-Month-Buyers, dated 2019-05-10 |
| Steel (St) | 611.47 | example Shanghai Steel Rebar Futures, dated 2019-05-10 (4140 CNY with 0.1477 USD/CNY) |
