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Lead
Many off lead's uses have been in decline for some time, it is no longer used for water pipes, its use in solder and paints is in rapid decline and environmental legislation is attempting to reduced its use in shot gun pellets, fishing weights and weights to balance car tyres. The lead/zinc battery for powering domestic electronics is also gradually being replaced by NiCd batteries. As lead is seen as an environmentally-unfriendly metal, its future is under constant attack.
Applications
Today, Lead's main use is for batteries, with the vehicle battery being all important. Despite the fall in many of lead former uses, lead demand has managed to keep growing as demand for lead-acid batteries expands as cars are being produced. With rapidly developing markets for cars in China and India, lead -acid battery demand has been given a shot in the arm.
In addition to vehicle batteries, batteries are also being used in industry to power mobile phone base stations, electrically powered vehicles such as fork-lift trucks and local delivery vans and to provide emergency power to computer rooms and hospitals.
Lead is still used in some chemical compounds, in weather-proofing buildings, is protecting electrical power cables and also in ammunition, see Chart 2
Demand
Lead demand has been fairly steady over the past few years with demand rising to 7 million tonnes in 2004 from around 6.6million tonnes in 2001. However the rise in overall demand masks changes in regional demand. Battery manufacturing has been closing in the west and new production is being set up in asia and especially China. Western consumption has fallen from around 5.6 million tones in 2001 to around 5.3 million tonnes in 2004. The rise in lead prices since 2001, has been more to do with supply shortages than buoyant demand.
Supply
Lead supply comes from a combination of new primary lead production and from scrap recycling, with each contributing about 50% of supply. Lead supply can be affected by a host of factors, during the 2001 down turn in metal prices, zinc prices feel to levels that prompted producers to cut zinc mine output. As lead is produced as a co-product of zinc, the cutback in zinc output, also hit lead mine output. As the zinc markets fundamentals were worse than those of lead, lead production was held back, this ead to a tightness in lead supply, which resulted in lead prices rising from the low $400s/tonne in 2001 to over $980/tonne in 2004.
Factors affecting supply
As roughly half of lead comes from recycled lead, it is worth noting that in times of low lead prices, the collection of scrap can become unprofitable and this has a marked impact on lead supply. Likewise, when lead price are high, there is a bigger incentive to find lead scrap and to supply it to the market. This makes lead more responsive to changes in price, than some of other metals that are more dependent on primary production and have relatively small secondary supply
The lead market can be one of the quieter markets, although every once in a while the market undergoes a period of higher volatility.
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