After a wild summer driven by chaos in the price of US copper, copper mining equities have begun to rebound – signalling that Donald Trump’s tariffs don’t matter all that much in the face of global demand for the red metal.
Southern Copper Company rose 9% month to date last week, trailed closely by Freeport-McMoran at 6% over the same period ending Friday at 44.94. Both stocks have rallied from a one-day plunge in late July when the White House announced long-anticipated tariffs on copper would be more limited than the market expected.
Copper mining stocks like FCX plunged over one day in late July but recovered by early September. Source: Yahoo Finance.
This recovery is due to investors’ positive outlook for copper and its applications across the globe. The red metal is a critical component in the economy of the future – everything from renewable energy to AI data centers to electrical grids – and analysts expect demand to continue to rise, driving up the market overall. The sector’s resilience despite the US’s tariffs is a clear sign that the world’s biggest economy is no match for global demand.
“Everyone’s bullish on copper because renewables and electrical vehicles and investment in the electric transition require a lot of copper,” said Jon Mills, an equity analyst at Morningstar. “The optimism of increasing demand from those things are driving optimism all over the copper space.”
The demand is significant. In 2024, the clean energy transition made up around 25% of demand for copper, a figure that is expected to jump to 61% in the next 15 years, according to research by asset manager Sprott. In an April study, academic researchers projected that more copper would be mined in the next 32 years than had been mined in all of human history.
This is why copper mining stocks beat the S&P 500 over the last month, even as US copper prices have remained flat. Through the first half of 2025, US copper prices and mining equities rose together, driven by the Trump administration’s signals that it would impose broad tariffs on imports of the red metal to stimulate the domestic copper market.
Prices for US copper futures contracts on the CME rose to $5.89 per pound in late July, a record high and at significant premium over copper futures traded on the London Mercantile Exchange (LME), matched by a rise in mining equities. On July 30, two days before the tariffs came into effect, the White House specified that tariffs would only impact semi-finished products such as copper pipes, and would not include unrefined imports such as copper scrap, as many analysts had anticipated.
The next day, US copper closed at $4.33 a pound and has not touched $5 per pound since, though mining equities have recovered.
US copper prices skyrocketed to record highs in July, before dropping when the White House clarified that tariffs would exclude unrefined copper. Source: CNBC.
This trend has worried some retail investors.
“FCX’s fate [will] mostly rest on copper prices…if it can give above $5 a pound and stay there it will be in good shape…else this stock might dive,” wrote a user named IDreamtIwokeUp in a subreddit for value investors, referring to the company’s stock ticker. The user said in their post that they owned stock in Freeport-McMoran.
But not everyone expected tariffs and the historic shifts in the underlying commodity price to drive equities up significantly, even if the stock prices for Southern Copper and Freeport-McMoran rose with US copper. In July, Mills only added a roughly $1 premium to his estimate of the intrinsic value of the Freeport-McMoran stock, even though it stood to benefit from more comprehensive tariffs because it owns mines and a refinery in the US. Because the firm does around half of its copper production outside of the US, he said, that would mitigate some positive effects of the tariffs on its business.
However, other analysts still expect the limited tariffs to give Freeport-McMoran a boost in its stock price. In an August research note to clients, Morgan Stanley analyst Carlos De Alba said he thought that the tariffs would allow the company to raise prices on annual contracts for rods which make up the majority of its North American sales, and upgraded his stock rating to “overweight.”
Tariffs aside, some US-based investors see stock performance and demand being driven by another economic story: the proliferation of data centers as companies invest in AI.
“Even with tariffs, there’s still demand for data centers everywhere with [the rise of] AI,” said Johnathan Horman, a financial advisor at Correct Capital Wealth Management in St. Louis, Missouri, which recently added to its almost $700,000 position in Southern Copper stock.
The biggest news in the copper world is happening outside of the US, however. Last week, Canadian mining company Teck Resources and the British company Anglo American announced plans to merge to form the fifth-largest copper miner in the world, causing dips in both Southern Copper and Freeport-McMoran stock.