Jiangxi Copper Corp will do its bit to breath new life into Thailand's copper refining sector, with production at a plant in the Southeast Asian nation due to restart next month.

The parent firm of the listed Jiangxi Copper Co Ltd said it will help Thai Copper Industries by providing technical aid to the Thai plant, said company sources.

Jiangxi Copper Corp has sent a group of technicians to the copper plant, which currently has an annual capacity of 165,000 tons.

The plant will produce anode copper, some of which will be sold to Jiangxi Copper Corp to manufacture cathode copper, sources said.

A combination of insufficient technology and the 1997 Asian financial crisis brought the plant, built in the early 1990s, to a standstill.

Jiangxi Copper Corp, China's top copper firm and the world's tenth, aims to produce 450,000 tons of copper this year, up from 343,000 tons in 2003, sources said.

The company, based in east China's Jiangxi Province, also aims to increase copper output to 600,000 tons by 2010 and become the world's fifth-biggest producer of the metal.

But it will have to increase its efforts to obtain supplies of the raw material at home and abroad to fulfill this target due to short supply from its own mines.

The company said it will buy one-third of total copper concentrate it needs this year from overseas.

In February, Jiangxi Copper Corp imported 20,000 tons copper concentrate from Chile.

The company paid 40 million yuan (US$4.8 million) for a 40 percent stake in Kanxi Copper Industries in Southwest China's Sichuan Province.

Kanxi produced almost 18,000 tons of anode copper last year.

"China will depend more heavily on copper imports in the long term because of its growing demand for the metal and domestic short supply," said Yang Changhua, an analyst with Antaike Information Development Co, a Beijing-based non-ferrous metals industry consulting firm.

China's copper demand will rise to 3.2 million tons this year from 2.90 million tons last year, Yang predicted.

Copper output in China increased by 12.7 percent year-on-year to 1.84 million tons last year.

The nation also imported more than 1.06 million tons of copper last year, up 15 percent from 2002.

"Chinese copper manufacturers have to turn to overseas to satisfy domestic demand," he told China Daily.

Jiangxi Copper Co Ltd, the first overseas-listed non-ferrous company in China, went public in Hong Kong and London in 1997. It also started to issue stocks in Shanghai in 2002.

The company's net profits surged by 198 percent during last year to about 505 million yuan (US$61 million).

Jiangxi Copper Corp, which has total assets of 15 billion yuan (US$1.8 billion), also produced 10.13 tons of gold and 220 tons of silver last year.

(China Daily May 24, 2004)