Fastmarkets summarizes five key points we learned at Antaike's 2019 China Industry Silicon Conference in Guizhou, China, over April 24-26.
Domestic silicon consumption in China likely to fall; concern growing over export prices Demand in China's silicon market is likely fall in the near term while the secondary aluminium market struggles with restrictions on imports of non-ferrous scrap metal, market sources told Fastmarkets on the sidelines of the conference. Tighter restrictions on non-ferrous scrap imports into China that will come into effect at the start of July this year could tighten availability of scrap aluminium. This would hurt the country's production of secondary aluminium products such as ADC 12 ingot, in turn affecting demand for silicon. The growing scarcity of scrap aluminium in China may also force some Chinese secondary aluminium producers to shift their capacity to neighboring countries. This would result in some domestic silicon producers in China switching their focus to the export market, market sources said. "When China imposed a 25% tariff on imported US-origin aluminium scrap,...