Since fall 2021, the European alumina industry has been facing significant and continuous increases in its production costs. Natural gas and electricity triplicating prices led to a first cost pass-through. The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation and the sanctions imposed to Russia has pushed further the energy prices amid a tightening of gas supply.
In the meantime, other raw materials have increased significantly, and inflation have reached high rates in all countries since decades. Those factors led to another cost past-through during spring.
In the past weeks, the situation has worsened. Energy keeping increasing, caustic soda prices at unprecedented values and doubling freight rates have impacted production costs further. The strong and quick devaluation of the euro against the US dollar has also dramatically increased the costs of most of the alumina raw materials.
Alteo is committed to continue to supply its customers with high quality products but cannot bear alone these constantly increasing production costs. As a consequence, in the coming weeks, Alteo will implement another surcharge in order to catch-up with current costs increases. We will be in contact with all our customers to work on the implementation of these new prices.
Although we perfectly understand the difficulty for our customers to pass through these costs to their own customers, the current situation remains unsustainable for Alteo and, we believe, for the alumina industry.