For the first time in 18yrs, India is a net copper importer

For the first time in almost 2 decades, India became a net importer of copper worth INR 14,000 crore in 2018-19. This has been attributed to the closure of Vedanta’s copper smelter in Tuticorin, which led to the erosion of more than 46% of the country’s production of the base metal. 

“Valuable foreign exchange is going out of the country and our cost of production has increased by about 1%, but even a 1% increase amounts to a lot in downstream manufacturing since more than 90% of our cost is incurred on raw materials,” opined Shyam Sundar Rathi, chairman of Vidya Wires — a local manufacturer of copper wires.