Dispatch: Five Cities
Jakarta
The base metals complex split down the middle this week. Nickel jumped to a five-week high on an Indonesian crackdown on domestic producers, while copper went the other way entirely: COMEX futures fell 5.0% to $13,697 a tonne (6.213 USc/lb, down from 6.543), their first dip to a three-month low. The two metals usually move together on the same industrial-demand story. Not this week.
Kolwezi
DRC residents, including eight children, are suing a Chinese-operated copper mine for alleged pollution, seeking $1.3 million in compensation and $5 million for environmental restoration. The filing lands the same week a US trading house is marketing itself on the opposite promise, traceable DRC copper and cobalt supply chains for OEM buyers. Zambia, meanwhile, has its own regulator pushing the opposite direction: the Minerals Regulation Commission wants tighter oversight written into its 2027–2031 strategic plan.
Beijing
China's smelters are getting squeezed from the byproduct side. Sulphuric acid, the smelter-floor output that kept Chinese copper processors profitable through H1 2026 after Middle East supply disruptions pushed acid prices up, is now sliding back down, narrowing the margin that had been propping up treatment charges. Elemental sulphur itself told a different story: China's benchmark print firmed 0.9% to $800 a tonne. Turkey's Tupras, a bellwether for Mediterranean granular trade, cut its price in November's domestic sulphur tender, a signal that matters as much to Gulf exporters watching European demand as it does to Istanbul refiners.
Odesa
France is keeping a maritime patrol aircraft over the Black Sea after a string of cargo ship attacks, and Bulgarian export risk is now doing real work in the wheat market, propping up prices even as CBOT wheat eased 1.2% to $220 a tonne (599.25 USc/bu). A Russian trade report this week described the paradox underneath that support: millions of tonnes stuck between field and port, unable to clear the corridor despite demand holding. Bangladesh, for its part, is still buying: a fresh tender for 50,000 tons of wheat is out this week.
Palo Alto
Cloudflare's edge got a serious database upgrade: SurrealDB launched Earth, a multi-model store deployable on Cloudflare's global network that scales from zero to tens of thousands of transactions a second without manual provisioning, and which its builders say has been pushed to 10 billion-plus peak rows per second in testing. Separately, OpenAI said it will acquire developer-tools maker Pierre Computer to build out Codex as a collaborative coding platform, and a telephony API for live voice agents went GA, letting developers place outbound calls over any SIP trunk with HD voice and DTMF keypad support.
Still moving
- Codelco's Andina division says river monitoring near its operations is "under control" after an operational incident on the Blanco and Aconcagua rivers; shareholders separately backed management reforms at an extraordinary meeting.
- Brent slid 5.3% to $99.25 a bbl ($751/t) and RBOB gasoline fell 4.1% to $2.78/gal, both sharp single-session moves without a single named trigger in today's wire.
- Palm oil eased 2.6% to 4,377 ringgit a tonne ($1,082) as Malaysian stocks rise ahead of a seasonal Indonesian export push.
- Rio Tinto put $144 million into Resolution Copper and AngloGold committed $900 million to expand an existing mine; Caledonia secured a $150 million bridge facility for its Zimbabwe gold project.
- Kolhapur's sugarcane standoff hardens into a three-district bandh called for Friday, after farmers rejected a Rs 3,900-a-tonne first instalment against a Rs 4,500 demand.