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General Market Commentary
PDAC 2020: Coronavirus weighs on mining outlook
It’s usually difficult to find a seat at the commodities session on the opening day of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention held in early March in Toronto, but there was a noticeably smaller crowd at this year’s Sunday afternoon talks.
At the start of his talk on the outlook for metals and mining in 2020, Paul Robinson, a director at CRU Group, noted the unusually sparse attendance – and the reason why.
“We can’t not talk about Covid-19 – coronavirus,” Robinson said.
“At the moment, there is no real change in global demand… Some travel is hit – you can see how empty this room is compared to normal, but we haven’t got any sort of level of significant hit like we’ve seen in China and South Korea.”
CRU Group is a London, U.K.-based company that specializes in commodities research, and Robinson shared some of CRU’s insights into the current and coming drivers of change and uncertainty in the mining and metals sector – including Covid-19.
As an example of the virus’s effects in China, Robinson noted that CRU employees in Beijing have been working from home for the last three and a half weeks – self-isolating, ordering food in, and also not buying consumer goods or booking holidays.