Chalco to resume 800,000 t/y alumina facility in Chongqing

It goes that Chalco, the listing arm of China's top aluminum maker Chinalco, is preparing to restart its production of its alumina project in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality.

The alumina plant is scheduled to hold annual production capacity of 800,000 tons.

March saw Chalco Shandong branch restore 400,000 tons of alumina capacity, and its Henan branch restart almost 1mln tons of alumina capacity.

Data show that the country has totally resumed 5-6mln tons of alumina since March.

"Currently, around 21.5mln tons of alumina capacities are in operation in China," said Shan Xiangbing.

Besides Chalco, some other large alumina enterprises have also started their suspended alumina production lines in the past two months.

At the same time, China's alumina import in April stood at 650,000 tons, hitting a monthly record high since February of last year, up 140% over March. Its alumina import in January-April period decreased 2.91% year on year to 1.67mln tons.

Aluminum prices in China had climbed from last year's valley of 10,040 yuan per ton to 14,900 yua per ton on April 10 of this year, and then hovered over 12,000-13,000 yuan per ton from late April to now.

Despite the country planned to restore more than 1.9mln tons of electrolytic aluminum capacity in March, actually less than half have been resumed so far.

Therefore, the resumed capacity for alumina stays far higher than that for electrolytic aluminum if calculated with 1.9 tons of alumina for producing one ton of electrolytic aluminum.

Some small alumina producing enterprises had lowered their EXW prices in face of mass production resumption.

Now alumina prices in China are approaching 2,000 yuan per ton. Chalco quotes its alumina price at 2,300 yuan per ton.

Alumina stocks at Chinese ports now total about 1.5mln tons.

Shan believed that alumina import in May will definitely reach above 400,000 tons if lower than April import.

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