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China’s copper concentrate imports reached a record high in April, spurred by an expansion of domestic copper smelting capacity that is due to come online later this year despite overcapacity in the sector.

Copper concentrate imports hit 2.9 million metric tons in April, up 25% year-on-year and 22% versus March, according to Chinese customs data published on Friday.

China’s copper melting capacity is up a quarter since 2021 and is set to rise another 10% or so this year, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence (BMI), even as mine closures overseas keep supplies of concentrate, the key raw material, tight.

“The surging imports for concentrate are to meet smelters’ capacity expansion plan, as they need to prepare stocks before starting operations in the latter half of this year,” a copper trader said.

Copper concentrate imports year-to-date are up 7.3% to 10 million tons.

Separately, China’s imports of unwrought copper and copper products in April were unchanged year-on-year at 438,000 metric tons, as suppliers rushed shipments to the United States to beat impending tariffs.

Analysts generally expect China’s robust copper demand to draw in growing amounts of the industrial metal. However, this month, the flow of copper to the US in anticipation of US import tariffs kept China’s imports flat year-on-year.

This shift has fuelled a surge in US COMEX stocks to 156,623 tons as of Wednesday, up 61% since the end of March and reaching their highest since October 2018.

The unwrought copper data includes anode, refined, alloy and semi-finished copper products.

For the first four months of 2025, unwrought copper imports were down 3.9% at 1.74 million tons, the data showed.

(By Violet Li and Lewis Jackson; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Stephen Coates)