Uranium’s Biggest Producer Gets Price Rise

The Kazakhstan tenge exchange rate (303 to the US dollar) continues to move lower as the country’s central bank has allowed it to float. This would normally be of little consequence for anyone outside Kazakhstan but for the fact the country accounts for 41% of the world’s uranium production (2014). For the Kazakhstan uranium industry, the price has effectively risen 72% over the past year and 109% over two years while the US dollar price of the energy feedstock has remained near a long term cyclical trough. There are numerous forces at work restraining global uranium prices but markets are strangely quiet about the impact of these currency moves. Historically, there have been outcries over exchange rate devaluations by major metal producers such as those in Africa and Latin America which have been perceived as taking unfair advantage from favourable currency outcomes and, in doing so, preventing markets from re-balancing as quickly as they otherwise could.