China’s aluminium imports set annual record, eclipsing 2009 high

SHANGHAI: China’s aluminium imports hit a record annual high with a month to spare, customs data showed on Wednesday, after November inflows took this year’s arbitrage-fuelled shipments above a previous peak in 2009.

Imports of unwrought aluminium and aluminium products into China, the world’s biggest producer of the metal, were 188,973 tonnes last month, the General Administration of Customs said.

That was down 26.4% from October, according to Reuters calculations, but up 158.6% year-on-year, customs said. It took imports for the January-November period to 2.44 million tonnes, a fourfold increase from a year earlier and eclipsing the 2.32 million tonnes imported in the whole of 2009.

China rarely imports large quantities of aluminium but its rapid recovery from the coronavirus crisis pushed Shanghai aluminium prices well above London prices this year, opening a so-called arbitrage window for cheaper overseas metal.

The spread between Shanghai and London prices peaked in July, when China became a net importer for the first time in more than a decade. Although the arbitrage window has since closed, metal has continued to flow in.

While overall imports are higher than in 2009, when a similar spread opened up as Chinese demand recovered from the global financial crisis, inflows of primary aluminium in 2020 - about 877,500 tonnes over January-October - are still well below the 1.5 million tonnes imported 11 years ago.

That is because this year’s surge in aluminium imports has also been driven by a rise in inflows of unwrought, alloyed aluminium, which topped 1 million tonnes over the January-October period.—Reuters