Predicted Future Development of Imperfect Complementary Goods – Copper and Zinc Until 2030

copper and zinc prices between 2011 and 2021 and to predict their
future prices until the year 2030. For this purpose, the following
methods were used: regression of neural structures in TIBCO's
Statistica software, version 13.0, time-series smoothing by means of
multilayer perceptron network, graphical representation, Pearson
correlation coefficient, and logical judgment. According to the
prediction, the copper price will decrease slightly compared to the
preceding years. In 2026, it is expected to stabilize at USD 610/t until
the year 2030. Zinc price is expected to increase slightly until the end
of the year 2030 when the resulting predicted price is USD 410/t.
Pearson correlation coefficient of copper and zinc achieves the
approximate value of 0.65. The results thus confirm the fact that these
commodities are not perfect complements. First, the mutual
relationship of the two commodities indicates that the price of zinc is
pushed up mainly by the copper price. On the contrary, the copper
price is pushed down by the price of zinc. There is a price
convergence between the two commodities. The future development
of copper and zinc prices is not subject to unpredictable events, such
as a political situation or the aforementioned COVID-19 pandemic.
Such a long-term prediction might thus not provide an objective
result.