China Minmetals Tungsten Bought 431.95 Tons Tungsten Bar Held by Fanya Metal Exchange

A Chinese court sold the inventory of bismuth and tungsten bar held by the defunct Fanya Metal Exchange for a total of 672.02 million yuan ($95.47 million), notices on the e-commerce platform hosting the sales showed on Saturday.

Two simultaneous 24-hour auctions that ended at 10:00 a.m. (0200 GMT) saw 19,228.05 tonnes of bismuth bought by Kunming Rongke New Materials Co for 606.07 million yuan and 431.95 tonnes of tungsten bar sold to China Minmetals Tungsten Co for 65.96 million yuan, data from the e-commerce platform Taobao showed.

The series of auctions on Taobao by the Kunming Intermediate People's Court, which have so far raised more than 5 billion yuan, are being watched by minor metals traders and former creditors of Fanya who say they are still owed some 43 billion yuan after the exchange collapsed in 2015 amid liquidity problems. It was later taken over by government investigators.

tungsten bar image

Neither sale achieved the market value stipulated by the court on the auction pages, which valued the bismuth, a silver-white metal used in soldering and stomach remedies, at 757.59 million yuan and the tungsten at 82.07 million yuan.

The price Kunming Rongke paid for the bismuth works out to 31,520 yuan a tonne - a discount of 23.6% to the current China spot price SMM-REM-RBM of 41,250 yuan a tonne.

Spot prices have fallen around 40% over the past two years, weighed down by the Fanya inventory overhang, which is equivalent to more than a year's global supply.

Prices for tungsten bar SMM-MIN-TGB, used in thermal conductors, are currently around 240 yuan per kilogram.

The 13 Fanya auctions so far, covering everything from antimony to tellurium, have raised around 5.59 billion yuan, according to the calculation.

 

 

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