Glasenberg presented at the company’s annual general meeting in Switzerland yesterday, which was relatively short at under an hour and featured only a handful of shareholder questions, all focused on environmental and social issues.

He said Glencore continued to show resilience in a tough commodity environment, crediting the strength of the company’s marketing business.

“Our company has a big advantage to other companies that only have the mining side of the business,” he said.

Commodity prices have improved so far in 2016, but most are still relatively weak.

“Unfortunately commodities are all moving in the same direction at the moment and they all move together,” Glasenberg said.

“The demand/supply fundamentals of the individual commodities has not taken place yet.”

Glasenberg said Glencore had the right mix of commodities.

“Some of our key commodities will move into deficit very shortly and you should get different commodity prices moving at different rates,” he said.

“Hopefully 2016 and going forward is going to be better than ‘15.”

Glasenberg promised that Glencore would remain disciplined on the supply side.

“We don’t want to dig the material out of the ground if it’s going to put pressure on the commodity price and push it even lower,” he said.

“We don’t want to dig it out of the ground – it’s a resource, it’s going to be there, it’s not going to run away.”

Glencore last year cut 300,000 tonnes of copper supply, 400,000t in zinc, 100,000t in lead and 15 million tonnes in coal.

It is also advancing its planned asset sales, with Glasenberg flagging the sale of the Cobar and Lomas Bayas copper mines, G Rail in Australia, further streaming deals, and confirming the sale of its Vasilkovskoye gold mine in Kazakhstan.