By Leia Michele Toovey- Exclusive to Copper Investing News

After the week started on a good note, on Wednesday a Fed warning that the U.S. economy still faces significant threats and bleak U.S economic data led Wall Street to its worst day since the 1987 stock market crash. Copper dropped as much as 8 per cent on Thursday to a 33-month low. Over in London, things were not looking any better; copper for delivery in three months fell as low as $4,545 a tonne, a drop of 7.6 per cent, to the lowest price since January 2006. The metal traded at $4,820 a tonne in official rings after closing at $4,920 on Wednesday.

In India, nickel and tin were the biggest losers but copper also dropped on rising LME stockpiles. Indian copper futures pared early losses and rose on Thursday tracking a recovery in global equity markets, analysts said. Copper fell more than 5 per cent earlier in the day, as fears of a global recession increased worries of slowing demand from major consumers and dented investor appetite.

Bullish news that workers had shut Chile’s top mining port Antofagasta on Wednesday, delaying a copper shipment for at least one multinational company, was lost in the stream of negative data. On Thursday, workers ended a 36-hour strike allowing exports to resume before the flow of copper was significantly hindered. Workers started their strike over pay and work conditions at Antofagasta, which serves Chile’s northern mining region, late on Tuesday, leaving copper shipment delayed for global miner Xstrata Copper.

Chile’s Codelco is bracing for a catastrophic drop in profits. Plummeting prices in copper hit the miner’s bottom line. If current copper prices are sustained, it is estimated that company profit will be $808 million in 2012, less than a tenth of record profit levels in 2006 and 2007. First half 2008 profits were $4.108 billion, down 12 per cent from the first half of 2007 profit of f $4.669 billion. The Chilean state-owned company also said copper production in 2008 will be 1.45 million tonnes, while 2009 output will be close to the 2008 level, or possibly lower. In early August, the company said it expected second-half copper output to rise 15 per cent from the first half.

China’s seventh largest copper miner, Western Mining Co, will launch a trial production at its Yulong copper mine smelter. The plant will produce at most 2,000 tonnes of refined copper by the end of the year if the trial run is successful, by 2010 the plant is expected to have production capacity of 20,000 tonnes. Yulong has proven reserves of more than 6.5 million tonnes of copper in ore and prospective reserves of 10 million tonnes. Western Mining holds a 58 per cent stake in the mine, and investment banking and securities firm Goldman Sachs owns an 8 per cent share. The trial is scheduled to take place this Friday.

Nevada Copper Corp has intersected 128 meters of 0.58 per cent copper, at its 100 per cent owned Pumpkin Hollow Copper Development Property located in Nevada. These results represent just one of the drill cores from the property to date; an updated resource estimate for the entire project is scheduled to commence this quarter.

Pumpkin Hollow is an advanced development stage copper property, which contains Measured and Indicated Resources totaling 4 billion pounds of Copper plus additional Inferred Resources of 3.9 billion pounds of Copper (all using a 0.2 per cent copper cut-off grade). In addition, the project is estimated to have 144 million tonnes iron, 1.3 million ounces of gold and 57 million ounces of silver.

Contained within the larger resource is a high grade core of 116 million tons grading 1.4 per cent copper at a 0.75 per cent cut-off containing 3 billion pounds of copper. Ongoing drilling has yet to define the limits of the Pumpkin HollowCopper-Iron-Gold-Silver deposit.

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