Arabal live blog - come and gone

The organizers at Arabal remind us every year that the aluminum industry is an industry, not just a market, so we started day 1 with awards for the best safety and environmental performances.

Once that and the official opening ceremonies were out of the way, we got down to our first session. This was a panel with the CEOs of the six smelting groups in the region (good to see Egyptalum represented) with Jorge Vazquez moderating.

Quickly it became clear that this would be less a panel session and more a prepared answer session with virtually no interaction with the audience. Perhaps it was to be expected, and may have even been a pre-condition for the CEOs in question to appear, but the end result was that we heard almost nothing new. The CEOs see little threat from Iran’s growth, and are more concerned about what might happen in the future with China. The views about Trump’s impact on aluminum were a mixture of optimism about infrastructure projects in the USA and concern about the possible imposition of import duties.

If only we had been able to explore some of the issues a little more.

Through the rest of day 1 and day 2, most sessions followed a similar format, with panelists giving initial commentary followed by questions. The only difference was the level of input from the audience. I am happy to report that the session of which I was a part took every question from the floor, with the moderator asking virtually no questions. But this too had its drawbacks - with the moderator failing to steer the conversation, some important topics were missed.

Day 2 suffered the same problem that many conferences deal with - a room full of empty chairs. IAI Secretary General Ron Knapp took a positive spin on the head count when moderating his session - he joked that at least those people who had turned up had made it back after the lunch break.

Perhaps the most amusing part of the whole conference came from none other than Said Mohamed Al Masoudi, CEO of Sohar Aluminum and shown in the feature image. In amongst the countless signs advertising the fact that EGA was the host of this year’s Arabal, Said was only too happy to announce that Arabal 2017 would be hosted by his company. Talking with him afterwards, it was clear that he took this assignment with great importance, and already has a team making the planning for Arabal 2017.

Arabal 2017 is only 12 months away!