Summary: | 碩士 === 中原大學 === 企業管理研究所 === 106 === Nickel is the main raw material for manufacturing stainless steel. The nickel consumption of stainless steel products accounts for 66% of the global nickel consumption. Therefore, the Nickel demand for stainless steel manufacturing dominated the trend of nickel prices. In addition, the Nickel cost accounted for 60% of the total cost of stainless steel products. If we can find out the correlation between nickel price and "the influencing factor", and analyze the correlation between the fluctuation factor and nickel price, we can avoid the risk of nickel price fluctuations and stabilize the corporate profit by estimating the nickel price.
According to the thesis review, there are twenty influencing factors, which might affect nickel metal prices. To conclude these factors, they can be summarized as two major causes affecting nickel price, which are “supply and demand of Nickel” and “government policy” respectively. The demand side indicators are “China GDP growth rate” and “China stainless steel production volume”. The supply side indicators are “nickel stock” and “Brent crude oil prices”. The government policy indicator is the “U.S. dollar index”. Therefore, five factors, Brent crude oil prices, U.S. dollar index, nickel stock, China stainless steel production volume, and China GDP growth rate, are selected as the research target of the nickel price influencing factors.
This study adopted the correlation analysis, unit regression, and multiple regression analysis of the SPSS method to construct the research process. By collecting the secondary data, exploring the data relevance of five factors, and interpreting the result through practical application, we may take these correlations as the reference of nickel price prediction. The data collecting period is from October 2007 to September 2017, divided into 120 periods on a monthly basis over a 10-year period.
The empirical results by unit regression show that five factors, such as Brent crude oil price, U.S. dollar index, China GDP growth rate, China stainless steel production volume, and nickel stock, are all highly correlated with LME nickel prices, of which the U.S. dollar is highly correlated with LME nickel prices on behalf of the nickel stock and China stainless steel production volume. Among these five factors, China GDP growth rate is identified as the best indicator to estimate the nickel price with a positive correlation of 63%.
Multiple regression analysis found that the price of LME nickel can be predicted both by the Brent crude oil price and China GDP growth rate, and the accuracy rate is 77%. However, if an indicator must be selected between the Brent oil price and the China GDP growth rate, the China GDP growth rate will prevail. It shows that for every China GDP growth rate changes 1%, the nickel price will changes 0.6%.
The results of this study show that the trend of nickel prices is highly correlated with China GDP growth rate and Brent crude oil price with the highest correlation. The study suggest that China GDP growth rate and Brent crude oil price can be used as a reference for estimating the trend of nickel prices, and minimizing the material operating risks.
|