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...In addition, there were ample stocks of silver in warehouses on the CME Group’s futures exchange, available for delivery if those short silver closed their positions, he added....
...A group of asset owners has called on Amazon to scale back its union-busting tactics in Alabama, where a group of warehouse workers are trying to organise....
...If tainted cobalt is found in its network of warehouses it could trigger a backlash from users of the exchange....
...Commodities Correspondent Henry Sanderson....
...Carmaking was once vertically integrated: Henry Ford controlled the raw materials that went into his cars, along with their assembly and distribution....
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...Copper prices fell 1.51 per cent on the London Metal Exchange to a four-week low of $,4,733 a tonne, writes Henry Sanderson, commodities correspondent....
...Brian Pitz of Jefferies expects Amazon’s growth to continue this year, as its retail operations benefit from sizeable investments in warehouses and logistics....
...Weighing on sentiment is a build-up of stocks of the metal at LME warehouses in New Orleans....
...That makes paying warehouse rent while storing metal look increasingly less attractive....
...Mercuria and Citi were in the midst of several of these deals a year ago when the Chinese authorities sealed the warehouses....
...JPMorgan recently sold a chunk of its physical business, including the Henry Bath warehouse operator, to commodities trader Mercuria Energy Group....
...In May 2013 Citi and Mercuria entered into a series of such transactions, involving metal stored in warehouses in Chinese ports....
...Mercuria has separately looked at the possibility of an investor taking a major stake in the Henry Bath metals warehouse business....
...Trafigura, one of the world’s top commodities trading houses which has a large warehouse business called Impala, said this month it was exiting third-party warehouses in China and restructuring its activities...
...Last December, Goldman Sachs sold Detroit warehouse operator Metro, although the bank said it had no plans to exit commodities....
...It also claims to have in effect delivered the metal to Mercuria by handing over warehouse receipts....
...The bank also argues it was entitled to require repayment if it believed the warehouses could not safely or satisfactorily store the metal....
...This has allowed a single buyer to control around half of the copper held in the exchange’s warehouses....
...During this period, a single buyer has held as much as 90 per cent of the copper stored in LME warehouses, the equivalent of 140,000 tonnes of metal....
...Mercuria plans to operate Henry Bath, a metals storage and handling business with warehouses in China, North America, Europe and the Middle East, as a standalone subsidiary, independent from its trading...
...Fewer goods are being delivered in bulk via single stops on vehicles’ routes to retail outlets, according to Henry Maier, chief executive of FedEx Ground, the company’s road-delivery division....
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