Vietnam's $5B Aluminum Hoard To Squash China's Choking Of Supply

The world is up in arms for aluminum. From shipbuilding to manufacturing industry appliances, and from aircraft components to consumer electronics, aluminum is vital for almost all industries, for fueling growth in the manufacturing sector, Vikrant Thardak reported for TGIGlobalNews.com.

Photo Insert: Molten aluminum being poured from a crucible

But due to the pandemic, energy crisis, the trade war with Australia, economic crisis, and heightened war-like tensions with Taiwan, the biggest consumer of the metal, China, has throttled the supplies. As a result, the metal’s value has charged to a 10-year high in London and is fast moving towards an all-time high above $3,300 a ton.

This has come at a time when the world is recovering from the pandemic, factories have just started humming again and consumers are engaging in revenge buying, which means venting out frustration against lockdowns by purchasing more and more.

Demand is skyrocketing and supplies are crashing, which results in higher prices. Soaring prices means lesser profit for the companies and lesser profit means lesser economic activities. Coming close on the heels would be unemployment, inflation, stagnation, and an economic crisis.

Vietnam’s remedy to China-orchestrated crisis: While the world remains on a wild quest to secure enough supplies for their aluminum-hungry industries, Vietnam has an easy solution to this burgeoning aluminum crisis.

Vietnam is sitting on a whopping 1.8 million tons of aluminum stockpile for the last two years, and if this stockpile is drip-fed back into the markets, it will not only dampen the roof-breaking stock prices but will also inundate factories with extra aluminum as well.

The humongous stockpile of raw metal, shrouded in black tarpaulin, sits at a site 50 kilometers away from Hanoi. The volume is equal to the entire annual consumption of India.

According to current prices, the value of the much sought-after giant mounds must not be less than $5 billion. As market experts put it, this is the only aluminum stockpile left in the world, and of a size the world has never seen before.

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