BEIJING, March 12 (Xinhua) --- China's lead and zinc industry realized a profit of 17.03 billion yuan in 2019, showing a year-on-year decrease of 16.6 percent, according to the data released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on Wednesday.
To be specific, due to the drop in the prices of lead and zinc, profits of the lead and zinc ore mining and processing industry went down 44 percent to 9.59 billion yuan in 2019.
Thanks to the loose supply of lead and zinc concentrates worldwide and the year-on-year increase in the processing charges of lead and zinc concentrates, the lead and zinc smelting industry realized profits of 7.44 billion yuan, increasing 126.1 percent year on year.
In 2019, the output of lead and zinc concentrates was 1.231 million metric tons (tonnes) and 2.806 million tonnes, down 7.5 percent and 1 percent year on year, respectively.
Meanwhile, the country's production of lead and zinc in 2019 was 5.8 million tonnes and 6.24 million tonnes, growing 14.9 percent and 9.2 percent over the previous year respectively. Among them, the output of recycled lead increased by 5.5 percent year-on-year, and that of recycled zinc increased by 22.9 percent year-on-year, according to the MIIT.
The country also increased imports of the lead and zinc concentrates last year. Data shows that the country's imported lead concentrates and zinc concentrates amounted to 1.612 million tonnes and 3.174 million tonnes, an increase of 31.7 percent and 17.5 percent year-on-year.
However, its imports of refined lead and zinc saw a year-on-year decline last year. The country imported 94,000 tonnes of refined lead and 605,000 tonnes of refined zinc in 2019, down 26.4 percent and 15.4 percent year on year, respectively. (Edited by Hu Pingchao, hupingchao@xinhua.org)
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