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Recovery still base case, but coronavirus big risk

A sharp decline in China’s economic growth in Q1 as a result of the coronavirus outbreak now seems certain. This will be a significant negative for metals demand, as China is the world’s single largest consumer of most metals, accounting for around half of base metal end-use. Our working assumption is that this loss of demand will be made up in the rest of 2020, provided that shutdowns in China don’t last for longer than a couple of weeks.

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