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 Russian giant UC Rusal, for example, has just returned to profit for
the first time in five consecutive quarters.
That's largely thanks to the combination of a robust London Metal
Exchange price, currently trading around $2,100 per metric ton
(1.1023 tons), its highest level since early 2013, and historically
elevated physical premiums.
The price recovery is being underpinned by a tectonic shift in
underlying market dynamics. After years of structural surplus, the
global aluminum market finally appears to be turning to supply
deficit on the back of accumulating capacity closures.
Rusal, which reported an 11-percent drop in production in the first
half of this year after its own curtailments, is forecasting a
1.5-million metric ton global deficit in 2014.
That may be at the high end of the spectrum of forecasts but it no
longer sounds like a producer pipe-dream. In the most recent Reuters
poll of analysts four out of 14 submitting a market balance
assessment for this year forecast deficit, the number rising to
almost half for 2015.
The main threat to this new market optimism comes from China.
Production there is still rising. More disconcertingly, so too is
the stream of semi-manufactured products leaving the country.
PARALLEL UNIVERSES
In the world outside China aluminum production has been trending
lower for a couple of years.
Annualized production in July was 24.38 million tonnes, down by over
1.5 million tonnes from the record high of 25.92 million tonnes in
October 2011.
It's been a painfully slow grind lower with closures of higher-cost
capacity partly offset by new start-ups, particularly in the Gulf
region. And it is continuing, U.S. producer Alcoa announced earlier
this week the permanent closure of its already-mothballed Porto
Vesme smelter in Italy.
Over the same near three-year period Chinese production has grown by
5.7 million tonnes annualized to 23.28 million tonnes in July,
according to figures from the China Nonferrous Metals Industry
Association.
Not that Chinese smelters have enjoyed better margins than anyone
else. But local governments and, at times, central government has
subsidized losses, mostly in the form of tweaking power rates, a key
determinant of an aluminum smelter's bottom line.
Even where Chinese smelters have been forced out of business, their
places have been more than filled by a new generation of lower-cost
smelters in northwestern provinces such as Xinjiang.
But China, to quote a phrase coined by Klaus Kleinfeld, chairman and
chief executive officer of Alcoa, exists in a different aluminum
universe, one that has little bearing on what happens in the rest of
the world.
And to a certain extent, that is true.
PRIMARY IMPORTER
Certainly, when it comes to primary aluminum, what China produces
largely stays in China.
And it has done ever since the country's authorities increased the
tax on exports to 15 percent back in 2006.
Since then it has been a net importer, albeit a fairly marginal one.
The single exception was in 2009. Imports that year boomed after
government intervention, in the form of "strategic" purchases from
domestic producers, which blew open the arbitrage window.
Not that China really needs more aluminum, just that there is money
to be made from playing the arbitrage, both in terms of metal prices
and interest rates in the shadow credit market.
Copper may dominate the collateral finance trade in China, but
aluminum is used as well, as has become clear from the ongoing
investigations at the port of Qingdao. At the center of a multiple
pledging scandal lie around 100,000 tonnes of aluminum and 200,000
tonnes of alumina, an intermediate raw material.
It is noticeable that China's net imports have slowed significantly
over the last three months to just 19,000 tonnes from 109,000 tonnes
in the February to April period.
That's probably a reflection of the relative under-performance of
the Shanghai price to the LME price.
But from the perspective of Rusal and Alcoa and other Western
producers, at least the net flow is into China and not outwards onto
their markets.
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PRODUCTS EXPORTER
What Western producers tend to draw a veil over, when it comes to
China, is the steady flow of aluminum in other forms out of the
country.
China has been a net exporter of aluminum alloy for many years. The
tonnages are not huge, just 347,000 metric tons last year, but
enough to counter-balance what enters in the form of primary
aluminum.
The country is a much bigger exporter of products and has been for
almost a decade.
This is in part down to government-led pressure on Chinese smelters
to go down the value-added chain, meaning more products capacity,
and in part down to the simple fact that Chinese products are highly
competitive, since exporters receive a tax rebate.
There have always been suspicions that some of those product exports
may not be quite what they appear, given the incentive to transform
primary metal just enough for it to quality for a tax rebate as a
product rather than be hit by the export tax.
Analysts fear such tax arbitrage, if it is taking place, acts to
disguise the true nature of Chinese surplus.
Macquarie Bank analysts, for example, contend that primary metal is
"exported under a sheet trade code such as continuous cast coil (CC
coil) which is then remelted, cast and alloyed to specifications in
the destination countries."
"We believe this is a trade that many Chinese aluminum fabricators
started to follow over the past couple of years to avoid 15-percent
tax on primary aluminum, which supports our view that some Chinese
aluminum surplus has been replaced by other forms". ("Commodities
Comment", Aug. 18, 2014).
Such concerns are increasing because Chinese product exports are
also increasing.
Product exports rose 3.7 percent in the first half of this year but
July brought a step change with 320,000 tonnes leaving the country,
marking a 14-percent jump on July last year.
One month's data do not a trend make, but the underlying trend is
only going in one direction and that's upwards.
It's just a question of how the trend evolves.
DEFICIT DANGER
And most analysts seem to be expecting an acceleration in Chinese
product flows over the coming months.
That makes sense, given the incentive of a higher base price on the
LME relative to the Shanghai market and the shift to deficit in the
world outside of China.
The danger, of course, is that Chinese surplus metal moves in
sufficient quantity to fill any evolving Western deficit.
Were this just a case of semi-manufactured products, the parallel
universe argument used by non-Chinese producers would still hold,
albeit somewhat tenuously. But if primary metal is seeping out in
thinly-disguised products form, things get a whole lot messier.
Moreover, the tensions between Chinese surplus and Western deficit
are only likely to become more acute, as long as the underlying
respective trends of rising and falling production continue.
It's worth remembering that it is only that 15-percent export tax on
primary metal that holds back a potentially much bigger export flow.
It's a dam that could be removed at the stroke of a pen in Beijing.
(Editing by Keiron Henderson)
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