The aluminium industry is facing two choices: overhaul its practices and speed up the struggling sector’s recovery, or do nothing and drag the pain out for longer.
That’s the message from Oleg Deripaska, Russian billionaire and ceo of UC Rusal, the world’s largest aluminium producer based on 2012 output, in Metal Bulletin Monthly magazine.
Deripaska, 45, laid out his vision for the struggling industry in an interview with Metal Bulletin at the Moscow office of Basic Element, the company from which his businesses originated.
“Aluminium, as with other industries, should work more and more in a ‘pull’ system, so we produce as much as our customer orders, not a ‘push’ system, which is to produce as much as we can push in warehouses,” he said.
Rusal was one of many aluminium producers operating partly on a ‘push’ basis during the downturn, which slashed demand for key consuming sectors such as transportation and...
