Growth in the time of commodity rise

Amid surging prices, Chinese companies find a variety of ways to survive and thrive

Earlier this month, as a bulk carrier that set sail from Chile in South America docked at a terminal of the Zhangjiagang Port in eastern China's Jiangsu province, Qian Jiang directed scores of workers unloading the cargo to ensure all 10,000 metric tons of the copper concentrate could be scraped clean to the last milligram.

The unloading process took over three-and-a-half hours to complete.

Qian, an executive from the quality control center of Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group Co Ltd in Anhui province, was under instructions to treat the imported copper concentrate as gold－precious because of the recent surge in commodity prices.