Good news for fiscal coffers in Chile. Codelco reported that surpluses during 2021 reached 7,394 million dollars, being 5,316 million dollars higher than the previous year. This is the highest figure delivered by the copper company in nine years. The state-owned company explained in its reasoned analysis that the strong increase is due to “the higher operating income obtained during 2021, generated by the strong impact on the increase in the average price of copper and to a lesser extent by a positive effect experienced by the other results not operational”.
It should be remembered that last year the price of the country’s main export product reached 4.23 dollars per pound, which is 51% above the figure for the previous year.
“The main drivers that explain this increase are: the improvement in expectations about the market and the price of copper; the more favorable perception of the evolution of the pandemic, hand in hand with advances in the vaccination process; economic stimulus deployed worldwide and the weakness of the dollar; the improvement in the projections of global economic growth; the lower aversion to risk; the reduction of inventories in the metal markets, and the uncertainty about mine production,” he said. Codelco.
Regarding production, in 2021 it reached 1.7 million metric tons of fine copper (TMC), as a result of the sum of the divisional productions and the joint contribution of the mining associates.