ICSG warns of copper deficit swing for 2026

Meeting in October 2025, the International Copper Study Group (ICSG) published a forecast that copper would run a surplus of about 178,000 tonnes in 2025 before flipping into a 150,000-tonne deficit in 2026. The group expected copper mine production to grow 1.4% in 2025 and 2.3% in 2026, while refined production growth was set to slow sharply, from 3.4% to 0.9%, even as refined usage kept expanding by more than 2% a year.

The ICSG's numbers, released on 8 October 2025, were among the first formal signals from an industry body that the copper market was tightening structurally rather than cyclically, months before the price itself broke records in September 2026.

An African stake in the balance

The study group's members include the major copper-producing and consuming economies, and its mine-supply assumptions rest heavily on projects in Chile, Peru, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia continuing to ramp up as planned. Any slippage in African output, whether from grade decline, power constraints or logistics bottlenecks, feeds directly into the kind of deficit the ICSG was flagging. That is effectively what happened: global mine production ultimately fell rather than grew through the first half of 2026, with the DRC among the countries where output declined, turning the ICSG's cautious 2025 forecast into an underestimate of just how tight the market could get.

Forecasts kept moving

The ICSG itself revised the picture again within six months, swinging to a forecast surplus by April 2026 as demand growth slowed. That volatility in the official numbers underlines how finely balanced the copper market has been, and how much weight forecasters now place on production data out of central Africa when judging whether the next move in price is up or down.

The ICSG's methodology relies heavily on member-country reporting, which for the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia is often revised well after the fact as informal and artisanal output is reconciled with formal statistics. That lag means African supply risk is frequently underweighted in the group's headline forecasts at the time they are published, only to be recognised retrospectively once actual shipment and export data catch up, a pattern that played out again as 2026 progressed.

Sources

• Miningweekly: Copper market expected to be in surplus in 2025 followed by deficit in 2026, ICSG says, 08 Oct 2025