Australia grows fat on China`s appetite - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[hainholz]

Australia grows fat on China`s appetite


By GREG TUBBY
27mar05
CHINA may be coming off the boil, but it is still raging hot in the resources kitchen.







Its voracious appetite for raw materials to fuel its rapid industrialisation has returned commodity prices to levels not seen in years.

Nickel is at a 15-year high, copper and tin at 8 1/2-year highs, silver has not been so expensive for 16 years and aluminium is at a 6 1/2-year peak.

Iron ore prices will rise by 71.5 per cent when the new contract year starts next month, while prices of coking coal, also used in steel production, will soar by 120 per cent.

Underpinning all this has been a surge in Chinese consumption, which has accounted for 40-50 per cent of demand growth for some commodities and caught most commodity analysts short, according to Commonwealth Securities analyst.

China`s economy grew by about 9.5 per cent in 2004, despite government curbs on investment and credit aimed at reining it in to more sustainable levels.

Beijing will apply the brakes again this year to meet a gross domestic product growth target of about 7 to 9 per cent, according to Australia China Trade director Juyan Feng.

It is a prospect that Leigh Clifford, head of the world`s second-biggest diversified mining company, Rio Tinto, has described as a welcome development for commodity markets, which are already stretched to meet demand.

But the true picture of China`s recent growth is more than simply an economy of 1.3 billion people rapidly industrialising.

As incomes grow, people want little luxuries, such as a washing machine and an airconditioner, and as people migrate from rural areas to the cities in search of a better life, the demand increases for infrastructure such as roads, bridges, hospitals and schools.

All of which feeds into demand for raw materials. But China`s recent growth also received a boost from a number of short-term factors, Mr Thurtell said.

"They eased monetary policy when SARS hit in early 2003, roughly at the same time as the Iraq war," he said.

"When the war ended and confidence picked up, their monetary policy was still pretty loose."

Chinese authorities also pegged the yuan against the US currency by buying dollars and selling the yuan.

China`s industrialisation is showing similar trends to what took place in other major economies last century, such as Japan. But despite its one-party communist regime, China – a member of the World Trade Organisation – was more open to foreign investment than either Japan or Korea were at similar stages in their development, Mr Thurtell said.

Adding to China`s impact on global growth, the world`s urban population was growing by 60 million each year – equivalent to building a new Paris or Beijing every two months, Alcoa Australia managing director Wayne Osborn said recently.

"What`s clear is that we`re in the midst of a global market transformation and growth not seen since the 1950s . . . this makes for once-in-a-generation opportunities," he said.

It`s difficult to overestimate the impact China has had on Australia`s resources industry.

At the end of the 1990s, China accounted for 5 per cent of total Australian exports; by 2004 exports to China had almost tripled to just shy of $11 billion and accounted for 10 per cent, the HSBC bank said.

Almost all of that growth has been in raw materials, mostly in metals and minerals.

Even at the end of the last decade, Singapore was a more important export market for Australia than China.

But by the end of last year, China had overtaken the US to become Australia`s second-biggest export market behind Japan.

[brokerbee]

Hi Hainholz,
sehe gerade, du denkst auch über China (und Australien) nach. Was sagst du zu Baskets??? Siehe China Basket Zertifikat Thread: China Basket Zertifikat

[bigbill]

[Prognoserich]

???

[Prognoserich]

gibt es weiter interessante Baskets?