Study On The International Competitiveness Of Major Chinese And Foreign Copper Producers

Mining activities play a very important role in the national economy and daily life.As an upstream industry,mining provides a constant supply of energy and raw materials for the development of various downstream industries.In the context of global promotion of energy transformation,the status of traditional fossil energy sources such as oil has been challenged,and the status of metal minerals related to clean energy industries such as nickel,cobalt,lithium and copper has been increasing.In recent years,countries like the United States,Japan,Australia,the European Union and China are recognizing the importance of ensuring the supply of key minerals,and have introduced key mineral catalogs and protection policies.China is the world’s largest consumer of mineral resources,but the domestic reserves are small and of low quality,so the level of international competitiveness of Chinese mining enterprises is related to China’s status in global mining activities and the ability to supply resources.In this paper,literature review,Delphi method and AHP hierarchy method are applied to construct a comprehensive competitiveness evaluation system with 5 primary indicators and 17 secondary indicators,using the sample of the top 10 global copper producers(including one Chinese company)and 3 other major Chinese copper producers with mined copper production more than 200kt/a(a total of 13 enterprises)as the sample.A multi-level gray correlation model was established,and the data of the 13 enterprises were collected and brought into the model to determine the ranking of their overall competitiveness by quantitative evaluation.The top 3 ranked companies are Glencore,Codelco and Freeport-Mcmoran;the 4 copper producers in China are ranked the 8th(Minmetals),the 9th(Zijin Mining),the 11th(China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group)and the 12th(CMOC Group)respectively.Further refinement of the indicators reveals that the main characteristics of the top copper producers include:global multi-regional,multi-species,full industry chain layout and great copper reserves.The overall competitive strength of Chinese companies is at the low to middle level,with major disadvantages including low copper reserves,development effectiveness and efficiency to be improved,and ESG management to be enhanced.In response to the above conclusions,this paper proposes initiatives to enhance the level of competitiveness of China’s mining enterprises from the enterprise and government(industry)level.At the enterprise level,we first need to expand mineral reserves through M&A,equity participation,in-situ mining and development of greenfield project.Furthermore,we need to benchmark world-class mining enterprises and carry out global multi-regional layout,multi-species layout and whole industry chain layout.Third,it is necessary to improve ESG management,as well as to use 5G,artificial intelligence,big data and loT technology to comprehensively promote digital transformation.At the government(industry)level,the first initiative is to improve the efficiency of platform construction and benign competition policy guidance for going out,mergers and acquisitions and upstream and downstream production capacity cooperation.The second initiative is to increase financial support and mining capital market construction to support enterprises’ overseas resource M&A activities and greenfield project development.The third initiative is to strengthen mining-related diplomacy and propaganda work.The last initiative is for government-managed industry organizations and institutions to better play the role of think tanks.The innovation of this paper is that it’s the first comprehensive evaluation of maj or foreign and domestic copper producers with a quantitative evaluation method,which is new compared with the existing literature and has a broader evaluation coverage and stronger comparability and reference significance.At the same time,on the basis of the traditional competitiveness evaluation index system,ESG management level evaluation indicators and financial indicators mainly based on cash flow are included,making the evaluation method more in line with the needs of the modern times and the evaluation indicators more responsive to the real financial situation of enterprises.Therefore,the evaluation results are more realistic.