Opportunity knocks for smelters

Aluminium manufacturers have long used sophisticated hedging and risk management techniques to protect against fluctuating metal prices, yet they have only recently looked at transferring these skills to power risk management. David Wilson reports

In the past 15 years, North American and European dominance of world aluminium production has slowly been eroded. New smelters have appeared in Africa, the Middle East and Australia, while the collapse of the Soviet Union brought Russian metal flooding onto the world market. Despite most of these new smelters being located significant distances from the main markets for downstream aluminium products, they are very profitable. The common thread in this geographic shift in aluminium