Chinese aluminium production hits a fresh all-time high in June

The world’s biggest aluminium producers have already written the aluminium price recovery script. LME three-month aluminium is currently languishing around the $2,000-per tonne level, weighed down by a mountain of surplus metal in the form of LME stocks. But fear not! The price is going to recover to $2,400-2,700 next year, according to Oleg Deripaska, head of the world’s largest producer UC RUSAL. The logic is simple enough. If prices don’t recover, higher-cost smelter capacity will close.

Klaus Kleinfeld, chief executive of Alcoa, read from the same script during the company’s analysts’ conference call last week. He didn’t leave much doubt as to where those expected production cuts will come. At current prices “we believe that roughly 6 million tonne of aluminum capacity in China is below the water-line. We expect that very soon, most likely in the third quarter, we will see 1 million to 1.5 million tonne coming offline.”

The only problem is, has anyone told the Chinese? Chinese production hit a fresh all-time high in June, according to figures from the China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association carried on the website of the International Aluminium Institute. Annualised production last month was 17.33 million tonne, 630,000 tonne higher than May and comfortably exceeding the previous all-time high of 16.99 million tonne recorded in February.

China’s output of the light metal has been highly volatile over recent months. However, the underlying trend has been clear. China’s cumulative production growth in the first half of this year was 49%, a figure that is only partly inflated by last year’s relative low base. Little wonder that increasing amounts of metal are seeping out of the country. China flipped back to being a net exporter of primary metal last month to the tune of 6,000 tonne despite a punitive 15% export duty.

The real story, however, lies below the primary metal water-line. Exports of aluminium alloy are accelerating. Net exports of alloy at 42,100 tonne were the highest since September 2008, a year characterised by widespread abuse of export categories. Exports of aluminium products, particularly bars, rods, plate and sheet, maintained their recent high level at 190,000 tonne last month. Cumulative net product exports soared to 736,000 tonne in the first half of 2010 from 280,000 tonne in the year-earlier period.

The problem facing non-Chinese producers such as UC RUSAL and Alcoa is that there is very little supply-side flexibility in the rest of the world. Higher-cost capacity in the old industrialised world was shuttered in early 2009 and most of it remains in mothballs. Output has actually fallen further in both North and Latin America.

Production increases in Europe, Africa and Oceania have been highly muted, evidence of how little capacity has been restarted since the dark days of the manufacturing collapse that followed the 2008 financial crisis. But that hasn’t stopped Western World production rising in 10 of the last 11 months.

The driver is Asia, specifically India and the Gulf, where new capacity is being brought online. Indeed, production growth in the Gulf has been so strong that the IAI has just created a new regional category to reflect what is becoming a major global aluminium hub. This new capacity is low-cost and operators will want to run their plants at capacity levels to recoup capital costs, meaning production in this part of the world is only going to grow further.

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