A Tale of Two Copper Markets

Podcast Transcript

Ed Coyne: Hello, and welcome to Sprott Radio. I'm your host, Ed Coyne, Senior Managing Partner at Sprott. I'm pleased today to welcome a new guest to Sprott Radio, Albert Mackenzie, Copper Analyst and Market Reporter at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Albert, thank you for joining me today on Sprott Radio.

Albert Mackenzie: Thank you very much for having me, and I'm looking forward to it.

Ed Coyne: Albert, you're a new guest to Sprott Radio. Tell us a bit about yourself, and then walk us through what you do day in and day out at Benchmark, and a little bit more about who you are as a firm.

Albert Mackenzie: I'm a copper analyst. I've been covering copper for about five years, though that seems to have gone quite quickly. I used to be a price reporter at a company called Fastmarkets, which does pricing for stuff like copper concentrates, which is what I was doing for a few years. That was a very journalistic job. Now I've moved over to be more of an analyst, but still with some of the benefits of being a journalist and trying to get market gossip and understand the day-to-day. I think the analyst sometimes has a much bigger picture than I do. I'm trying to recreate narratives, talk to people in the market, and understand what's happening day in, day out.

My role is to take the research we do as a big team and turn it into stories, sometimes simplifying it to make it digestible. As a company, we're an analyst house focused on the energy transition. We have a strong analysis of EVs and the energy transition, including batteries, energy storage systems and related topics. Then also lots of those commodities that go into it. That's where copper comes in. Because it's such a good conductor, it's important to all those technologies as well. Then we obviously cover lithium, nickel, cobalt and the things that go into those batteries, too.

Ed Coyne: Let's focus on copper and talk about, in your mind, what do you think is predominantly driving that market today?

Albert Mackenzie: I would say it's a very narrative-driven market at the moment. In the last six months or year, it has moved away from traditional fundamentals in several ways. I think sometimes it follows the fundamentals when they're bullish. It's moved away from some of the fundamentals we would traditionally look at and seems to be consistently positive, no matter what's happening. We've had a few examples where stories have been bullish, and then the inverse of the story has been bullish. Whether there was peace between Iran and the U.S. or not, for some reason, some people said that was bullish, and the price went up. Then, when it started up again, people said, "Oh, that's bullish for the price."

At the moment, there are these big narratives and a lot of positivity, mainly driven by AI and the energy transition, paired with a fear about supply. It's not necessarily those day-to-day, nitty-gritty things you might traditionally have looked at, like, oh, what's construction doing in China this week or this month, or what PMI figures are out of Germany. It's this big, overpowering narrative that there won't be enough copper in 10 or 15 years. Certainly, the price, which seems to be what's driving it, is this positivity.

Ed Coyne: Yes, it did seem about maybe six months or a year ago, Wall Street was getting it wrong. That old narrative of Doctor Copper was the bellwether of whether the economy is growing or shrinking. Are you really saying it's stepping out of that shadow and really creating its own new narrative, given the supply-demand dynamics we're seeing?

Albert Mackenzie: Yes. I think the Doctor Copper thing is also interesting. Traditionally, the reason that the Doctor Copper name exists and the reason why people looked at it like that was that it was based on lots of the big macroeconomic data you get. If you're trying to work out what's going on with the economy, you look at PMI data, employment numbers or GDP growth and stuff like that. That can be quite delayed. If the economy's struggling for some reason or another, or consumers aren't particularly happy and aren't investing or buying, it can take a couple of months for it to show up in the real data.

The idea was that if you look at order books, if you go and speak to people making wire rod and selling wire rod to construction companies, car companies, companies that make fridges, companies that make microwaves and all of those different things, because copper goes into everything, if you spoke to those people, they'd have an idea before the data actually did. It's become a self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe even before I covered the market, that people say, "Oh, copper's really tied to the economy. Oh, so the economy we think is going to go badly, so copper should go down," rather than it being this little secret that you could work out what was going to happen next by looking at it.

Ed Coyne: Everyone, including myself, loves stats. What are some of the numbers that people may not be familiar with that you like to refer to when you're making the case for why copper now?

Albert Mackenzie: Last year was the first year ever that the LME averaged $10,000 a tonne across a year. The all-time high last year was $11,000 a tonne. Now that's a pretty good price. If you were to have had this conversation with even the most bullish person last year, they probably wouldn't have thought that copper would be where it is now, which is about $14,000 a tonne. The copper price has shot up significantly. In real terms, it's up close to 50% on more standard prices that we might have seen last year or the year before. It's one of those things that shot up so quickly that it's turned even some quite bullish people into quite bearish ones.

This time last year, you'd look at $9,500 and think maybe it could go higher because of EV demand, the struggle to bring on capacity. Actually, now it's so high that people, maybe even myself, would now be more bearish because I'm like, "The price is just really high at the moment."

It's hard to justify it day-to-day. I'm going to speak in some sweeping statements because it's hard to be too nuanced sometimes. The copper price is generally driven by the quarter before or two quarters before, the coming quarter and maybe the quarter in the future. You look at the Chinese economy and think maybe next year or in the next six months they'll want more copper, so the price goes up, or maybe there's not that much demand from the EU, so it goes down.

Now people are looking like 20 years into the future and saying, "There's not enough copper for 20 years." That's not how it's normally worked. It's slightly odd. To me, that's a slightly odd way of pricing a market like this. It's like it's an equity. When people look at investing in AI companies, SpaceX or something, they're not pricing it at what it's worth today; they're pricing it at what it could be worth in the future. It's not necessarily how commodities are normally priced. It's not necessarily bold enough to say that it's the wrong way of doing things, but it's unusual.

Ed Coyne: From a copper standpoint, you talked about microwaves and different things that copper goes into, goes into everything, what percentage does copper typically represent? I know it's going to be different across industries, but is it such a large percentage of a product that it's going to start driving prices higher, or do you get copper at any cost because you need it and can't replace it? Have you started thinking about that a little bit, what that looks like longer term?

Albert Mackenzie: Yes, we have. There are some standard assumptions about the relationship between aluminum and copper. The reason copper is so well used is that it's the second-best natural conductor of electricity after silver. Obviously, you're not going to use silver. Copper's a bit expensive. Let's go and buy loads of silver.

Ed Coyne: There are a few people, maybe some of the multi-billionaires are going to wire their house in silver, but the average person's not doing it.

Albert Mackenzie: Or audiophiles who want perfect sound quality or something like that. That's part of it. Certainly, if you look at demand driven by stuff like AI data centers, those companies have more money than they know what to do with. They're not going to care about a couple of hundred dollars' worth of copper at the end of the day on a per-ton basis. If it's $12,000 or $13,000, their view will be to get it in. Also, there's some debate about how effective aluminum is at replacing it in those settings, since aluminum's a bit more brittle. You might have to replace it more often. You have to use more of it because it's less conductive. There are a few negatives to that.

Then, likewise, the case for cars or something like that is on the order of a couple of tens of kilograms. I'd have to double-check it, but say it's 50 kilograms at the end of the day, the copper price moving a few thousand dollars doesn't really impact the individual consumer. Say you're buying copper cathode and turning it into wire; you then pass the price of that input cathode on to the person who's turning that wire into a radiator, who then passes it on to the person who's selling it into a car, who then passes it on to the consumer. Then, ultimately, it doesn't necessarily feed into inflation that much. Obviously, it has some impact because it's in everything. It's certainly in phones, but it's not really adding to the cost of an iPhone, is it?

Ed Coyne: What about recycling then? Is recycling stepping into the narrative and maybe filling a gap at all, or is it just not enough to really make a difference?

Albert Mackenzie: Recycling's a big part of the conversation. It grows every year because consumption does as well. If you say it's 30 years or 20 years, once something has been used and then comes back into the market as scrap, you're looking at China now, which really took off its industrial cycle about 20 or 30 years ago. Obviously, they're able to recycle more copper than they were 10 years ago, because that stuff's coming back into the system.

When prices push up, you get this initial boost in scrap because scrap traders tend to operate relatively under-hedged businesses. They'll buy, and then they'll sell when the price is better. It's not whether the price is good. It's whether it's relatively good compared to when they bought it. The price has risen significantly over the last six months, so a lot of material has come online. The other thing is, and this is really hard to quantify, I would say lots of the analysts who look at scrap, it's like the X or Y in the equation that you've got all the other numbers for.

You're like, "Well, we know we mine this much. We know we use this much, and those two numbers don't add up. Why don't they add up?" The answer is scrap or stock drawdowns.

Then you say, "Well, scrap must be X tons because it just doesn't add up otherwise." The other thing is that the higher the price, the more it's worth recycling things you might not have done in the past. Copper from very complex scrap, you might see some more of that, but it ultimately can't really fill the entire gap. Lots of scrap are generated, and demand then re-emerges.

If you pull down a building to remove the scrap, or pull down an old housing block to build a new one, the new housing block will probably use more copper than the one built 30 years ago. You do see that in China, sometimes they'll incentivize people to bring stuff back and recycle it. It generates scrap, but it also generates demand. It's how you equate those two things.

Ed Coyne: I never thought of it that way. That's a great way to conceptualize that. That's a very true point. You're tearing something down, you're getting scrap, but now you're building something else that's going to need more of it. You never catch yourself.

Albert Mackenzie: Also, if you assume we live in a world where we're going to need more copper, the past copper is never going to equal the amount that we need now. It's a big part of the picture, but it's not like a silver bullet.

Ed Coyne: What about discoveries? Following this stuff as an analyst, any discoveries coming online that are like, "Wow, this is going to really change the landscape," then I guess part two of that will be, even if there isn't a discovery, what does that timeframe look like before they're actually pulling stuff out of the ground?

Albert Mackenzie: There are a few things that I would say here. Firstly, there aren't many new, big discoveries. People get excited about 300,000-, 400,000- and 500,000-ton mines. The biggest mine in the world is called Escondida, and people always say, "Oh, we need a new Escondida every year for the next 10 years," or whatever it is. I don't know how many Escondidas we need, but it's always measured in Escondidas. Then they get disappointed when it's a 150,000-ton mine.

Now, there aren't many massive projects coming. Cobre Panamá, which is currently shut, appears to be looking to reopen, and there are media reports that they are hiring people. That would be an interesting mine if that were to reopen. That's a relatively large one. There are also regions like Argentina. If you can think of a mining company involved in copper, some of them have a stake in a mine in Argentina. If you add them all up, you're looking at over a million tons a year if they all come online. Obviously, there are questions about Argentina as an investment destination.

The geology is there. There's a willingness to invest there, and the government is willing to help that investment. Historically, there's a reason why there aren't many mines in Argentina, a country that is geologically designed for mining, but copper is not being mined. Some people are skeptical about it. I'd look at maybe regions rather than individual projects. Lots of those mines are also very well underway. The other two things are a brownfield investment. It's sexier to talk about a big new mine, but it's also important if someone can get an old mine that maybe wasn't economically viable 10 or 20 years ago, when it shut, to reopen and start processing copper again.

Ed Coyne: Would that be considered a greenfield, then, if it's an existing mine they're going to reopen, to get that terminology out there for maybe newer people to copper?

Albert Mackenzie: I don't know if there's a set way to find out. Greenfield, nothing was there before. Brownfield, I would maybe lean towards improving an existing asset and then restarting, which I guess comes under brownfield. If it literally stops processing something and then starts up again, I guess you'd put those under restarts. There are a few of those, and there's a lot of brownfield investment.

One reason people are concerned about future copper supply is that many currently operating assets are forecast to experience production declines in the coming years. With copper prices being as high as they are, those companies will invest and keep it going. As I mentioned earlier, Escondida is looking at building a new concentrator. That will mean that the asset can keep going a bit longer. The other thing, and coming to the length of time it takes, I would mention China and the DRC, a huge amount.

I think we worked out that 70% of the net new copper production in the last 10 years has come from the DRC, and 70% of global new copper production in the last 10 years has come from Chinese-led investment. Now, there's this big thing that people say it takes 20 years to open a copper mine. It can take longer in the West, in Australia, in America, in Chile. It can take a long time to build a copper mine from scratch to a functioning asset.

You find it, drill into it, and discover a range of economic insights. Then you convince your board, your shareholders, your bank, the local government, the local community, and all of that, "This is a really good asset. You should invest in it." All of that takes time, and people will appeal against this and that, and investors will be scared that people will oppose it. They might be more cautious and try to do more work to get it off the ground.

In the DRC, there isn't the same degree of scrutiny for a new project, and Chinese investment looks at these things very differently from how we do in the West. If you are a publicly listed company and you have to tell your customers every three months how much money you're making, how much you're spending, and what your profit is like, and they want dividends. They want bonuses, and they want this sort of thing: saying, "Hey, we're going to open a mine in 10 years," is less appealing than "We just made loads of money this quarter."

It can be harder for that. Those companies can invest. I'm not saying that China's the answer to everything, but there is an element of if China needs something in 10 years, if they're looking at 10 years down the line and going, "There's not enough copper," they'll make sure it works. They'll find a solution in a way that modern Western capitalism sometimes struggles to. I think that's a big part of the solution: not to bet against China.

Ed Coyne: What does the M&A market look like today? Are you seeing money move around? Are you seeing people talk about that?

Albert Mackenzie: If we start from the point earlier where I said it can take a mining company a long time to open a mine in somewhere like Chile or Australia or North America, but you're aware as a mining company that this thing is going to be worth loads of money, if you have a good copper mine, it's worth loads of money, but you don't want to take the risk. A much simpler way to do it is to buy another company that already has lots of mines.

We've seen a lot of that. BHP bought OZ Minerals, an Australian mining company focused on copper, a couple of years ago and immediately added a lot of copper production to its books. This is an odd one because Rio Tinto already owned a large stake in the Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia, but it was a partnership. They bought the company they were in partnership with, and Anglo American and Teck, two of the biggest copper companies in the world, have both been subject to takeover attempts in the last couple of years, so Glencore tried to take over Teck. BHP tried to buy Anglo, and they are merging.

That makes a very diversified miner, but with a real focus on copper. If you look at their report and their conversations from that time, there was a lot of talk about how big this copper mining company was. This is the resource of the future, and we're going to be a big player in it. Then there was talk of Glencore and Rio Tinto, too. I think it would have become the biggest copper miner in the world if Glencore and Rio Tinto had merged, or very close to it. There's been a lot of talk about that.

It is easier than taking that risk on yourself and building a new mine for 10 years; it's just bringing that material into your books. I think more broadly, also, if we're talking about the fact that copper prices are at all-time highs, that's obviously not too bad for copper mining companies. Their revenues look relatively good in the latest set of quarterly results. Also, it's interesting that companies like Rio Tinto and BHP, which are highly diversified miners, are often associated with iron ore. Still, copper is playing a larger role in their revenue streams every quarter.

Obviously, there's been inflation because of the war in Iran. When you already have something like Escondida that's making money at $8,000 a ton. Then the copper price goes to $14,000 a ton; it's like $6,000 for free.

Ed Coyne: Not bad. Now, is the cost going up a little bit as that's happening, or doesn't it really matter when it's going up that fast?

Albert Mackenzie: Yes, cost is going up. There have been a few things, like how some copper production is done using a process called SX-EW, which uses a lot of acid. It's about 20% of the market. Acid prices have gone up a hell of a lot. Obviously, diesel prices, energy prices, wages, all of this stuff since COVID, there have been inflationary factors on everything. The copper price has risen by 50% over the last 8 months or so. We're not getting close to that on the inflation of running these mines. I guess borrowing costs have gone up as well. That's important. Often, these deposits have gold and silver, and those have also skyrocketed in value.

Ed Coyne: I was going to ask you about that. We're talking about these copper mines, but it's just a pure copper mine, or does copper come out of other mines, or does gold come out of copper mines? What is the ecosystem of that? How does that look, and how does that play into the pricing as well?

Albert Mackenzie: One of the biggest copper mines in the world, I call it a copper mine, and I've heard people refer to it as a gold mine, because it's got so much of both. If you look at it in net tons, it is a big producer in both. They are very commonly found together, often silver as well.

Ed Coyne: Got it. Then we talked about copper continuing to hit new highs or hitting a high, then tracing back, and maybe flirting with the next new high. Are the miners keeping up, though? Are investors looking at miners? They still predominantly focus on just the copper itself. Where are we in that cycle?

Albert Mackenzie: The exchanges that these metals are traded on, the CME, the LME, the SHFE in China, are relatively hard for people to trade on. They are complex financial instruments. They're traditionally designed for hedging, for people who use this metal. What people tend to do is buy a miner, an ETF or something similar that gives them exposure to a company with copper on its books. Then that's probably how most retail investors get involved. The copper price has gone crazy. We've had some slightly interesting stories about people trying to buy copper, which is probably not recommended for physical health.

I've spoken to some traders in Europe who've had people phoning them up and be like, "Can I buy some copper? Because I'd like to put it in my garage, then when the price spikes, I can sell it." That's not a very good way of doing that. If you're selling less than a ton of copper and you have to assume that if someone's investing it to put it in their garage, they're not buying much more than a ton, they're probably going to buy it like it's scrap, and they're not going to give you a very good price for it. There have been many media reports recently about people stealing copper.

Ed Coyne: Crazy.

Albert Mackenzie: When people talk about copper getting to $30,000, or you hear crazy numbers sometimes, it would become very useless for lots of its applications because it would just get nicked. You couldn't use it for cabling on railway lines, overhead wires or anything like that. People would steal it.

Ed Coyne: We saw that with platinum and palladium. There were stories of cars being jacked up and having their catalytic converters taken out.

Albert Mackenzie: Exactly. It's that sort of thing. It's the industry around it that would start to malfunction if it went too high. I think the South African railway administration has stopped using copper altogether on its railway lines. They've said, "We're never going to install any copper ever again." It just gets nicked, you know? South Africa, as a country, banned copper scrap exports for a little while, a couple of years back, because that's the best way to sell nicked copper as scrap. It was getting exported as scrap, and they basically tried to kill the market because they knew it was being resold.

Ed Coyne: Talking about exports, particularly here in the West, in America in particular, tariffs. How is that impacting copper? Is it impacting copper? Are people trying to guess what tariffs are doing as exports become a big part of this and prices continue to rise? What are you hearing?

Albert Mackenzie: Surprised myself, I haven't mentioned it so far because it's a large part of why the prices are so high. There's a strong case to be made that we wouldn't have seen the all-time highs we've seen without that tariff. Interestingly, we at Benchmark, along with basically every single analyst house, most miners and most traders, all saw a massive surplus of material last year. Not a deficit, a massive surplus. Now, the reason the market felt tight and the reason why LME stocks, for those not super aware, LME is the London Metal Exchange, it's the main global exchange for copper and the main warehousing facility for copper as well.

The stocks on that exchange are low and are really crashing. They've gone down by hundreds of thousands of tons since May, largely because the material is going to the U.S. Essentially, what's happened is that Donald Trump's administration has indicated that there might be a tariff, suggested that there would be, said lots of stuff around it, gave loads of different deadlines, you'll know by this date, you'll know by that date. What it did was create an arbitrage between the two markets because American participants tend to use the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) for pricing copper.

The LME price is a duty-free price. Wherever you send it in the world, it goes to a free port, and it doesn't go through any tariffs or anything like that, but the CME is a tariff-included price. To put something on the CME, you have to take it through customs. What's essentially happened is that because there is concern that there will be a tariff, the CME prices reacted by almost a percentage or 3% or 4% or 5% or whatever, depending on what day you look at it, as if there might be a tariff. It's an estimation of how likely that tariff is.

Ed Coyne: You're effectively getting two different prices on two different exchanges, then?

Albert Mackenzie: Yes. I checked this morning, and the CME was about $500- $600 per ton above the LME. That's even more noticeable on the forward curve. The LME is in a healthy contango. If you think in a year, there will be a tariff on copper, and that tariff will be about 15% because of things that the government has said in the U.S., it would be reasonable to hedge and to assume that that price a year from now is going to be about 15% higher than it is right now. That's just a logical assumption. There was a time when people viewed it as free money. If you can buy something on one exchange for $13,000 a ton, you can sell it on another for $13,500 a ton.

You can log those two positions, or you can book a full position. You're literally going, "Well, I'll take that and put it over there for £500 more than I bought it for." The U.S. imports last year just skyrocketed, more than doubled. We worked out that there is more copper stuck in America, just not being used, just sat in warehouses, than any other country in the world consumes annually, after China and the U.S.

If you were to put the consumers in the last year or so of copper in the world, it would go to China, then to the U.S., and then to U.S. warehouses. More than Germany, Japan and Korea. If you can think of any commodity or think of anything in the world, if you had the third biggest consumer in the world popping up out of nowhere, like this place that no copper used to go, just warehouses in America, all of a sudden, then obviously it disbalances the market. What you have is a deficit outside the U.S., even though we're producing enough copper.

The uncertainty created by the Donald Trump administration regarding copper is almost certainly part of why prices are so high. It's a U.S.-centric problem that has affected everyone. Whether you're buying copper from the DRC and selling it to Italy, or whether you're buying copper from Indonesia and selling it to China, or whether you're buying copper from Chile and selling it to the U.S., all of those people have been impacted by the inflated prices caused by the uncertainty of U.S. policy.

Ed Coyne: I had a couple of other questions. Before I go on to those, is there anything in particular that you wanted to highlight that I didn't get to?

Albert Mackenzie: I was thinking, while we were talking, if we're looking at really high prices and we're assuming that the tariffs are a big part of that, what happens next is really interesting. If prices are higher because hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tons of copper that don't need to go to the U.S. are going to the U.S., if that situation stops, and that situation would stop if there were ever clarity that there's not going to be a tariff, if the U.S. administration says, no, we're not doing a tariff, we're not going to tariff copper. You've killed that demand, and the U.S. would start drawing down its existing stocks.

Also, if you put in a tariff, the U.S. might again start drawing down those stocks already there, rather than people paying the import duty. Either way, you're no longer incentivizing this very particular trade of moving material to the U.S. to profit from the arbitrage. Prices are really high now. Depending on what happens with the tariff, you could see prices go a hell of a lot higher. If the U.S. administration signposts that they're going to do a tariff, there's a bit of lead time, and say they give you six months to get copper into the U.S., which in their actual wording of their last statement they implied they might do, you'd then have a massive rush of copper to get in the U.S. and that would push prices up really high.

Conversely, if a tariff comes in immediately, that draw dies, and maybe the global copper price starts to react and fall a little. It's created high prices now, but it's potentially created a situation for volatility. Copper's in everything. It's traded by small and big companies, little wire makers and people who make radiators in Europe and all this stuff. The volatility can be quite problematic. The prices have risen so much that people's working capital has become a problem, and they have had to renegotiate with their banks about the amount of credit they have. If you think of someone who's transforming copper, you're not profiting off that price.

You're profiting off the transformation cost. You're then insuring more, financing more, and your working capital is higher, but you are not making much more money, or your profits aren't really changing. If anything, it might go down. The volatility is good for people who trade it. It's an opportunity to make money off of, but it might not necessarily be good for the day-to-day functioning of what can traditionally be a very orderly market.

Ed Coyne: Ultimately, the consumer probably absorbs most of that, right? Maybe a microwave is an extra $3 or £3 more expensive than it was a year ago because inflation creep is starting to show up due to rising raw material costs.

Albert Mackenzie: Then if you look at aluminum prices, they're really high as well at the moment. Again, maybe in the U.S., that's partly tariffs, but also what's happening in the Middle East, and oil prices are higher, gas prices are higher. It all feeds into the same inflationary narrative.

Ed Coyne: I know you guys do your own podcast as well. You guys have some cool stuff on your website. For investors who are listening to our podcast today and want to learn more about this, how could someone keep track of you, your comments, what you're talking about, and maybe even follow what Benchmark is up to?

Albert Mackenzie: Thank you for the opportunity to plug. Firstly, we have our own podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you get podcasts. It's called the Benchmark Copper Weekly. I think that's its official name. It's just a weekly rundown of everything that's happening in the copper market. We also have our website. Our analysts tend to be fairly active on LinkedIn, sharing graphs. If you like graphs, we share a lot of them.

Ed Coyne: I saw a couple. Thank you, by the way, for accepting my LinkedIn request the other day.

Albert Mackenzie: I do like sharing a graph. We also send a free weekly newsletter to our clients. We do this really long “everything that's happened in the week in copper” email, and we have a shorter version of it that's free. People can sign up for that on our website, too.

Ed Coyne: Awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you've got a lot going on, and a lot is happening in this space, so thank you for taking the time today to talk to us at Sprott Radio.

Albert Mackenzie: No worries. It was a really lovely conversation. I'm very happy to have joined.

Ed Coyne: Wonderful. Well, once again, I'm Ed Coyne and thank you for listening to Sprott Radio.