China court sells Fanya metal exchange indium in cut-price auction

BEIJING, April 25 (Reuters) - A court in southwest China hassold a batch of indium held by the now-defunct Fanya NonferrousMetals Exchange on its second attempt, after lowering the askingprice, an auction page on e-commerce platform Taobao showed onThursday.

A single bid from an as yet unidentified bidder took the34.64 tonnes of indium, a silvery metal used in flat-paneldisplays and semi-conductors, accepting the opening price of37.41 million yuan ($5.56 million).

The bid came 10 minutes before the 24-hour bidding windowclosed at 10 a.m. local time (0200 GMT) on Thursday.

The Kunming Intermediate People's Court is selling offFanya's assets to pay investors owed nearly 40 billion yuanafter the exchange's collapse in 2015. The bourse's founder wasjailed for 18 years last month for crimes includingembezzlement.

The Kunming court first tried to auction off the same volumeof indium, divided into two lots, in January, putting the marketvalue of the metal at over 50 million yuan. The court did notreceive any bids, with minor metals traders saying at the timethat the minimum asking price was too high.

The opening bid for the metal was set at 1,080 yuan perkilogram this time, 10 percent lower than the 1,200 yuan minimumset for the first attempted auction in January.

Indium prices are down 23 percent for the year so far at1,175 yuan per kg, according to Chinese industry data providerShanghai Metal Exchange Market <IN-MM-SHMET>.

The Fanya exchange held 3,600 tonnes of indium inventorybefore it collapsed - equivalent to several years of globalproduction. The sale shown on Taobao was the first successfuldeal for the indium stocks.

($1 = 6.7275 yuan)(Reporting by Tom Daly in BEIJING; Additional reporting byDavid Stanway in SHANGHAI)