Commodities | Mar 10 2010
By Rudi Filapek-Vandyck
It would seem we missed the monthly report on the uranium industry by consultant TradeTech in our reporting last week. Otherwise we would not have reported a small gap between weekly U3O8 spot prices at TradeTech and peer Ux Consulting.
Contrary to our report last week, TradeTech too had made the decision to lower its weekly spot price indicator to US$40.50/lb, similar to UXC's price, by lowering by an extra US25c after it had lowered to US$40.75/lb on Friday February 26.
Anyway, now we have settled this matter, the price gap we reported last week has opened up this week instead. TradeTech left its weekly spot price unchanged at US$40.50/lb while UxC has actually raised its price by US25c to US$40.75/lb.
Yes, you read that correctly: one of the industry's weekly spot prices has actually stopped falling and recorded a small gain this past week.
On TradeTech's assessment, February saw a total of over 2.8 million pounds U3O8 equivalent changing ownership through 15 recorded transactions. TradeTech does note that news of a successful allocation of uranium in the form of UF6 from the US Department of Energy has changed the dynamic in the market in that buyers are more willing to do deals and sellers were actually trying to raise their prices.
As such, it's probably a fair assumption spot uranium prices have seen their bottom, for now.
We also picked up that Canada is thinking about relaxing ownership rules for Canadian uranium companies. At present, Canadian law restricts foreign ownership to 49%.
Long term uranium benchmarks have remained unchanged at US$60/lb.
