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Chinese copper giant Amer’s affiliates see staff exodus as trading crackdown, faltering economy weigh on metals sector

  • More than a dozen employees have left Shanghai-based copper traders affiliated with Amer in recent weeks, according to people familiar
  • Many market participants have stepped back from the Chinese metals trade in the last year amid low margins and some high-profile disputes

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In a rare interview in 2015, a top official at an Amer trading unit in Shanghai told Bloomberg that the company handled about a 10th of China’s copper imports. Photo: Bloomberg
Bloomberg
More than a dozen employees have left Shanghai-based copper traders affiliated with Chinese conglomerate Amer International Group in the past few weeks, according to people familiar with the matter, in the latest sign of challenges facing one of China’s biggest private companies.
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Amer, founded by billionaire copper tycoon Wang Wenyin, is China’s 38th-largest company by revenue, according to the Fortune 500 ranking, and once boasted that it was responsible for 10 per cent of the country’s copper imports.

The exodus of staff – which includes some of the group’s top physical and derivative traders – highlights the strain in China’s metals sector, which has been hit by a lacklustre recovery from the pandemic and a crackdown on trading at state companies.
The employees resigned from Amer’s trading affiliates including Shanghai-based China Copper Mineral Resources. They included some operational and financial managers in addition to traders, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the information is private. The companies, which for years have been major players in China’s copper market, have been downsizing their business, the people said, and are either unwinding or redirecting some of their long-term contracts.

The departures are mainly due to the challenging market conditions, four of the people said. Many market participants, including some of the largest banks, have stepped back from the Chinese metals trade in the past year amid low margins and some high-profile disputes – including the fall of Maike Metals International, once the country’s top copper trader.

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Among Amer’s staff, anxiety has been further heightened by recent debt disputes that led courts to limit the personal expenditures of Amer’s chairman Wang, who is known in the local media as China’s “copper king,” twice in recent months. Both of the restrictions were lifted within one day after negotiations with creditors.

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