Aluminium cos' officials to meet Adhia on safeguard duty

Aluminium industry officials are set to meet Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia next week and pitch for a safeguard duty on the lines of one on steel products in a bid to check cheap imports from China and the Middle-East.
Following the imposition of 20 per cent provisional safeguard duty on steel products by the government, industry body Aluminium Association India (AAI) is readying its case for a similar duty, sources said.
The association is collating data for all primary and rolled products to strengthen its case and its members are slated to meet the Revenue Secretary next week, they added.

Last month, the association members -- Vedanta Group CEO Tom Albanese, Hindalco Deputy Managing Director D Satish Pai and Nalco CMD T K Chand -- met Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and urged him to raise the import duty on the metal.
Indian producers are facing a double whammy of cheaper imports and meltdown in global prices. Since April 2011, primary aluminium prices at the London Metal Exchange (LME) dropped 42 per cent to USD 1,540 a tonne in August this year from the earlier USD 2,623 per tonne, an AAI official said.
Aluminium hot metal cost of production (excluding interest and depreciation) on the domestic front has risen 29 per cent to Rs 1.2 lakh a tonne from Rs 93,700 due to increase in cost of power, logistics and introduction of the Renewable Power Obligation and a clean energy cess, he added.

"The resultant impact has endangered an investment of Rs 1.2 lakh crore by domestic producers to augment capacity from 2 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) to 4.1 MTPA. Indian producers are currently operating at just about 50 per cent of their installed capacity," the official said.
In August, Balco, part of Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta, had said it has shut down its aluminium rolling business due to a steep fall in prices of the metal, besides dumping from China and falling margins.
During the same month, Vedanta Aluminium said it has started the closure process of one of its production streams, which will cut the Lanjigarh facility's output to half and impact up to 2,000 jobs.