BLACK CHINA BLOG

Astrid Bru Saetrevik has announced that she is getting her hands dirty! Astrid has moved into the Karmoy Carbon Plant as heard of Anode Services for Hydro. There’s always been something special about the lead carbon person in Norsk Hydro. From Aadne Hoines, Benedikt Machens to Syver Hellem and now to Astrid, Hydro’s […]

The October edition of the Black China Report went out this afternoon. If you are a subscriber, you should have received an email from Jane Zhang - check your SPAM folder just in case. We sent it out as a direct PDF this month, because the normal app that we use is still being […]

Chalco has announced that it will gradually close its Liancheng plant, with a loss of about 520,000 tonnes. The announcement was worded very diplomatically, using terms such as flexible downsizing, and that workers would get fair compensation. But it also made clear that Chalco would mothball all of the plant’s 500KA cells. We think […]

Alcoa announced their Q3 results overnight. The company reported earnings of $109 million after allowing for special items, or $44 million without those special items. (The biggest single special item was a restructuring charge, partly assigned to Primary Metals.) According to the major media outlets, the consensus opinion was for a result of $0.13 cents […]

Some readers might have got a message “Error opening database connection” when trying to log into the blog. I am told by our server people that this message was because of a password and address error in the PHP admin files. I have no idea what that means, but it is now fixed. […]

I have just returned from a private event in Dubai. The Gulf Aluminium Council provided its members with a market update, and to do that it enlisted the speaking talents of Julian Kettle of Wood Mac, Natasha Kaneva from JP Morgan, Nick Madden from Novelis on downstream, and a speaker from LME. I […]