London: Earth-i has announced to launch a service for traders and miners on October 18, ahead of LME(London Metal Exchange) week to spy over copper smelters through satellite imagery to predict their shut down and boom. The service, sold by Earth-i will keep surveillance over copper smelters as to get beforehand notice of their closures and openings, which could lead to jumps in copper prices.
The copper market is widely watched and closely studied by analysts and researchers as an indicator of a good economy since the metal is widely used in many ways from construction to manufacturing. To watch over these irregularities of going off and on of copper smelters resulting in a surge in prices, Britain-based Earth-i which uses geo-spatial intelligence in collaboration with Marex Spectron and the European Space Agency is set to launch a ground-breaking product, the SAVANT Global Copper Smelting Index. The dataset will provide key operational status reports of the world's copper plants to subscribers. Most of the surveys on copper miners and smelters are released every month.
Earth-i Chief Technology Officer John Linwood said: "Historically when you look at smelters, the challenge has been getting up-to-date information." Over the last year, the company has been testing SAVANT and conducting trials with financers, traders and managers and also detected a major closedown in Chile, the world's biggest copper-producing country. “SAVANT delivers unique insights, not just to copper producers, traders, and investors, but also to analysts and economists who use metals performance as strong indicators of wider economic activity," says Wolf, Global Head of Market Analytics at Marex Spectron.
Earth-i uses twenty high-resolution satellites along with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning-led analytics working with satellite image processing. They also launched their satellite last year. The SAVANT Global Copper Smelting Index covers and monitors 90% copper smelting around the world. The data will allow users to make informed and timely decisions to tackle jolts in copper prices. "Earth-i will also publish a free monthly global index from 18 October" a statement by earth-i, the index will be free but delayed.
