China’s net exports of primary aluminium and aluminium alloy were 550,000t in the first nine months of this year, just shy of the 554,000t reported for the same period of 2005, according to the early snapshot of the September trade figures released by the official statistics agency.
The early snapshot doesn’t provide a breakdown between primary and alloy but on a combined basis they were just 0.7% off the pace of the Jan-Sep 2005 period. That amounts to a major catch-up since for most of the first half of this year they were running at significantly lower year-on-year levels.
To some extent the change over the last couple of months reflects a sharp drop in net exports from Aug 2005 onwards, a period which coincided with the government’s crackdown on the tax-efficient use of toll-smelting and which is now affecting the year-on-year comparison.
That said, however, net exports in Sep itself of 71,623t were a fresh monthly record for the year-to-date.
We estimate net exports of primary metal alone were around 57,000t in September, which would represent the third consecutive month of increase and also a fresh 2006 record.
Our estimate assumes that exports of alloy were close to the Jan-Aug average of 33,000t per month and imports were close to the Jan-Aug average of 18,000t.
As usual, we’ll be looking in more depth at China’s trade figures when the full September report is released towards the end of this month.
Meanwhile, exports of product continue to soar. They were 118,512t in September, above the 100,000t level for the fourth consecutive month. Cumulative exports of 866,502t in Jan-Sep 2006 represented super-strong year-on-year growth of 67% and may go some way to explaining why the Beijing authorities are said to be working on plans to remove tax benefits from tolling metal into products for the export market.
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