China’s copper crash: bars fall from investment fad to scrap in a month
A brief speculative frenzy amid skyrocketing gold and silver prices leaves some retail investors holding shiny kilogram bars they can’t sell
During the Chinese New Year holiday, Katty Mao struggled to find buyers for 500 “investment-grade” copper bars she bought in January, when soaring gold and silver prices made the 1kg chunks of polished metal seem like a promising investment.
“I know it was a bet,” said Mao, who paid 160 yuan (US$23) each for the bars. “But the fear of missing out outweighed [any concerns].”
Over the past two weeks, the advice Mao heard most often was to sell her bars to a scrap-metal dealer.
The resident of Shenzhen, in the southern province of Guangdong, was not the only one caught up in a brief speculative frenzy over the industrial metal.
In mid-January, 1kg copper bars appeared on counters in Shenzhen’s Shuibei, China’s largest retail market focused on jewellery and precious metals. The bars – engraved with Chinese characters to resemble gold and silver bars, but lacking the certificates true bullion would have – were priced between 180 yuan and 300 yuan. On an e-commerce platform, some merchants asked for more than 320 yuan per kilogram.
These prices represented a premium of as much as 200 per cent above the spot price of copper, which was around US$14,500 per tonne at the end of 2025.
The roller-coaster journey from humble industrial material to packaged investment product to waste took no longer than a month, driven by the anxiety of Chinese retail investors like Mao amid the historic global surge in gold and silver prices.