India changing copper market: Hindalco boss
- 3 December 2025
Air conditioners, EVs and renewables are among the “fundamental reasons” copper demand is set to soar in India, according to Hindalco Industries copper CEO Rohit Pathak. Speaking in London at Resourcing Tomorrow 2025, he said copper consumption growth from circa-1.7 million tonnes to as much as 5Mt by 2035 would make India “by far the second largest consuming region” in the world behind China.
“We are growing at about eight-to-10% every year,” Pathak said.
“Why is this growth happening? I think three or four fundamental reasons.
“One, over the last eight-to-10 years the entire country has been connected to the national grid. India has got the largest single national grid, which has now connected every village across the nation to the central grid. And with that connection, obviously the uses of electricity are increasing.
“Almost 300 million people have come up from poverty into the middle-income zone and hence the consumption patterns are increasing. So there is massive urbanisation that is happening.
“In the next 10-to-15 years, three-fourths of India will get built.
“It’s a massive amount of infrastructure build that is going to happen in terms of housing, in terms of commercial spaces, factories, which is driving the demand.”
Pathak said about 300 gigawatts of renewable power was going to be added over the next five years.
Increasing incomes were driving demand for air conditioners. “The Indian air conditioning market is really going crazy. India is hot so ... air conditioning is a very, very hot market,” Pathak said.
“And India is also becoming a hub for exports to other regions like Europe and the Middle East.”
Meanwhile, it was “early days, but with the EV cycle picking up that’s an area which is seeing a fair amount of growth”.
“The largest part of the demand will remain housing wires and cables, which is where we are seeing very rapid growth, not just for consumption in India, but also for exports,” Pathak said.
He said surging consumer electronics consumption and a nascent manufacturing sector developing under the country’s Make in India push constituted another “big ticket” demand item.
India is already the world’s second biggest importer of refined copper and a national government policy document released earlier this year indicated the country might be importing more than 90% of its copper concentrates by 2047, when demand could climb to nearly 10 million tonnes per annum. Its modest domestic copper reserves mean it is looking to bring the metal into free trade agreements with Latin American and other countries.
Hindalco, India’s largest copper producer, is also looking to expand recycling of scrap and other sources of copper.
“We are also building the first [recycling] centre in India,” Pathak said.
“It is not just that copper is going to be available in the form of scrap but [there is] a twin benefit in that today it is processed in many places in a very crude manner and that’s not environmentally sustainable.
“Second, it enables high-quality copper to be produced which can then go into electrical applications. Most applications of copper are in electrical applications which require very high purity. A lot of the fires that happen typically emanate from poor quality copper used in end products.
“So the twin objective [with recycling] is both environmental benefits as well as the quality of copper that can be produced.”
