It's not just the country's exports that are undergoing a shift change. The same is happening on raw materials imports with those of alumina shrinking and those of bauxite rocketing.
The reason is the super-strong growth in China's domestic alumina sector. Official figures suggest it grew by 54% in the first quarter of this year with every sign that the growth rate is still accelerating.
That's reduced local smelters' need for imported metal, although ironically not by as much as expected, since smelter capacity has been reactivated in response to the alumina production surge, thus increasing the country's overall alumina needs.
Imports of alumina fell by 14% to 1.466 million tonnes in the first quarter of this year with those in March itself sliding to 355,101t from the 500,000t plus levels seen in the two prior months.
But all that new alumina capacity needs bauxite to keep it running and imports of the raw material continued to surge in March. Monthly imports at 1.774 million tonnes were a new record and cumulative imports grew to 4.444 million tonnes in the first quarter of this year from "just" 1.116 million in the same period of 2006.
By far the biggest supplier was Indonesia with imports from that country totalling 3.215 million tonnes in the first three months of 2007.
Strong Chinese imports of scrap, by contrast, have remained a constant. They rose by 15% to 409,900t in the first quarter of this year.
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