Codelco, the world’s biggest copper producer, is shipping less of the metal to China after a burst of new domestic capacity in the Asian nation, according to the Chilean company’s chairman Maximo Pacheco. China will remain a “very strategic market” for the state-owned Chilean producer, Pacheco said. But he added that its sales volumes of cathode — or refined copper — are under pressure as China’s own output of the metal grows at a double-digit percentage.“We see clearly that the sales of cathodes in China is decreasing because of the expansion of smelting capacity in China” and elsewhere in Asia, Pacheco said during ... (full story)